Industry news for the professional cartoonist
David Parkins, a British-born cartoonist working for the Globe and Mail in Toronto, has captured the mood down here as the Democratic National Convention rounds up. A lot of my favorite overseas cartoonists don’t seem to quite grasp our political system, but I do keep an open mind and, given that Parkins’ political cartoons are…
This Reality Check (AMS) raises an interesting question: Do you have to be a guitar player to get the joke? My feeling is that you only need a very basic understanding of music to get a chuckle, because the G-Clef tells you it’s about music and you should know there are majors and minors that…
Mannequin on the Moon (AMS) suggests a line that some major newspapers could adopt for the benefit of readers. I find it annoying when they list a headline on their opinion page that promises a challenging, interesting opinion, but doesn’t include the byline, so that you click on it and discover that, indeed, it’s from…
We’re going to take a little break from politics today, while I recover from having spent the past week banging my head on the desk. Like the grandfather in The Buckets (AMS), I’ve been sparring with my computer and various online entities. Both the motherboard and hard drive on my desktop are in hospice, but…
A substantial portion of the public really likes Kamala Harris, but, as Phil Hands notes, the press is losing patience. Having posed the question of how she can make up for lost time with the elections so close, they aren’t very happy with her answer of taking her message directly to the public instead of…
Day by Dave (AMS) reminds us that today is National Tattoo Removal Day, and I suppose the way you react to that information could be an indication of your age. Whamond’s gag assumes a relationship between alcohol consumption, getting a tattoo and regret. The question isn’t whether that pattern exists. Of course it does. The…
Nancy, Li’l Abner, Ziggy, Crankshaft, Barney Google, Mallard Fillmore, The Shadow, Pearls Before Swine, Working Cats, Rosebuds, Goomer, Suburban Fairy Tales, and, believe it or not, even more. Rick Kogan of The Chicago Tribune was surprised to come across an old man (no, not me) reading the funny pages in a print format on a…
ICYMI, Rabbits Against Magic has it right: The Democratic Nominee has excellent taste in music, though Mingus is more jazz than swing. But the pun works and we’ll let it slide. My mother turned me on to swing. She was the first female disc jockey on Harvard’s Crimson Network, then one of the founders of…
The answer is a lot easier than Walt Handelsman expected it to be. As noted here yesterday, the stock market is largely driven by a combination of rumors and panic, as Kal Kallaugher noted in the wake of the October 1987 crash: The good news is that Wall Street followed its worst day in two…
Our theme starts with today’s Baby Blues (AMS). My first impression was that it was another “overscheduled kids” gag, which is an okay issue in general but has been done and overdone and doesn’t make me laugh anymore. So I flipped past, but then “Wait till your dad gets home” pinged my brain and I…
Some of comics’ most iconic characters found their homes in these long-running comic strips, from Dick Tracy to Beetle Bailey. In some cases, they’re icons from another era, but that doesn’t keep many of them from still appearing in newspapers today. The longest-running comics are a testament to the importance of including comic strips in…
Randall Munroe imagines himself in the Olympics in today’s xkcd, and I notice that the funniest places he’d expect to find an unqualified amateur are in the sports in which style is the deciding factor. Which evokes a 1959 Peanuts that has always been close to my heart and which, apart from my extensive history…
The news of the day is Caroline Cash beginning her turn on the Nancy comic strip. For whatever reason my first thought on seeing the first panel was The Captain and the Kids by late Rudy-John Dirks and/or The Katzenjammer Kids by late H. H. Knerr-Doc Winner. Again, I don’t know why. It’s inexplicable. This…
Scott Hilburn wins the Fortuitous Timing Award, though if he’d run today’s Argyle Sweater (AMS) 24 hours earlier, he might be up for a Pulitzer. Yes, it’s a different form of airline chaos, but given his lead time, I think he did pretty well. Besides, the types of chaos that ensued appear to have been…
Non Sequitur (AMS) manages to strike an appropriate note through serendipity, given Wiley’s lead time. Indeed, things could have gone worse and, also indeed, fate is recalculating. In any case, the second day of political cartoons about the attempted assassination have mostly indicated that we should give cartoonists a little more time, so we’ll back…