Ill health took a toll on Walt Kelly and Pogo. By the early 1970s friends and family were pitching in more and more hoping the creator would recover enough to return to the strip full time. That, alas, did not happen. In 1973 Walt Kelly died. So widow Selby Kelly with Don Morgan, Henry Shikuma, […]

The political scene is incredibly toxic, with Ron DeSantis and his merry band of supremacists creating an astonishing false reality with which to program the next generation. However, both George Wallace and Dr. MacLeod have jumped on this outrageous lie. I’ve got nothing to add except to thank them: We need decent people to speak […]

In places like New York City, papers were sold to the masses at a penny a copy. Thus this era is called the Penny Press. It’s also the era of what was called Yellow Journalism. The term arose out of a battle between newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst about a comic strip […]

Tom Tomorrow poses an interesting question: Should the mainstream media give coverage to foolish, hateful propaganda? Nobody would likely care about transgender issues if the rightwing hadn’t ginned it up and turned it into a major political matter. In the real world, it only impacts a very small percentage of the population and their friends […]

A recent list of “10 Great But Forgotten 1990s Newspaper Comic Strips” includes current comics Zits, Mutts, Non Sequitur, Sherman’s Lagoon, Tom the Dancing Bug, and Agnes. Six of the ten 1990s comic strips tagged forgotten are still appearing in newspapers today. Their greatness can be debated (I see more than half as qualifying), but […]

King Features Syndicate “announced a master publishing partnership with Mad Cave Studios to develop a full line of new narratives, comics reprints and graphic novels starring its iconic hero Flash Gordon. The initial Flash Gordon stories are slated to be released in 2024.” Read the news of the licensing agreement here. Under this partnership, expect […]

(photo: NBC) With all due respect, they got it wrong. When Cheers was taken over by a corporation, they brought in Rebecca Howe and she was the boss and eventually Sam bought the bar back and he was back in charge. Well, it was a comedy after all. In the real world, as in the […]

That’s comic, I say comic strippin’ the Comic Con, son. Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis, both veterans of comic conventions, began preparing for the San Diego Comic Con last week as all true comic fans did. Sunday got the Crankshaft co-stars in their costumes and today to The Con. Tom and Dan are responsible for […]

The Associated Press drops the story of McClatchy ridding themselves of political cartoons and cartoonists. Here, via the Voice of America, is the AP article by David Bauder: The firings of the cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week were a stark reminder of how an influential art form is dying, part of […]

I promised Suzi I wouldn’t get into any political rants on her birthday. Though I’m not sure she’d hear any stronger language than if I were Edison Lee (KFS)‘s dad and had just spent an entire story arc building a shed just to find this. But I’m blaming the lawn mower, since doors are more […]

Back in May we noted that AdExchanger had lost Nate Neal as their weekly cartoonist, now, a month late, we note that Kevvo has been chosen as the new AdExchanger cartoonist after a month of rotating cartoonists. Kevin (Kevvo) Gierman has been creating the cartoons regularly for the past month.

(Adam Sacks) (Joy of Tech) So I got on Threads (comicstripoftheday) and yet, unlike Scrooge, my life has not been transformed. I don’t much like it, because it seems crowded, but maybe that’s because I don’t much like looking at things on my phone because they seem crowded. I’m assuming Threads will eventually come to […]

Below are some comic strip and cartoon books scheduled for July 2023 release.Images and links (mostly) via Amazon,though ordering through your local comic shop or independent book store is a good idea. Nineteenth-Century Women Illustrators and Cartoonists I Was a Teenage Michael Jackson Impersonator! Big Nate: No Worries!: Two Books in One THIS IS IT, […]

Cartoonist David Illsley has passed away. From the obituary: David Avard Illsley, age 81, of Edgewater, Florida, passed away Tuesday, July 4, 2023, at Advent Health New Smyrna in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, after a long illness. David had been employed as an Artist/Cartoonist/Videographer, in TV, newspapers, and educational venues in various cities. David had […]

I don’t know if today’s Non Sequitur (AMS) counts as “fortuitous” timing, since nobody in Vermont or the lower Hudson Valley is calling much of anything “lucky” at the moment, but there’s certainly a load of synchronicity in it, since I’m sure Wiley did the strip some time ago but today a lot of people […]