Industry news for the professional cartoonist
Too Much Coffeeman brings up the hostility some people have for banjos, which I confess I don’t understand, but which seems to be of a piece with their hostility towards bagpipes and accordions. I’ll confess to not being a big fan of full-sized accordions — forgive me, Myron Floren — but I enjoy a well-played…
Start with the good news, which is that I agree with Dave Granlund’s idea though not with the sense of crisis it suggests. That is, kids shouldn’t get drunk and drive around, but while you can’t stop all of them from doing it, it’s not the issue it was when I graduated (gasp) 57 years…
Stan and Jan Berenstain, the Philly natives who created [The Berenstain Bears], met as art students at the Philadelphia Museum and School of Industrial Arts — most recently known as the University of the Arts. It was during their time there in the 1940s that they honed their illustration skills. Stanley Melvin Berenstain and Janice Marian Grant were…
(Thank you, Clifford Berryman) Pearls Before Swine (AMS) makes an excellent point, though there’s more to it. If you go back half a century, the evening network news was half an hour, but so was the local news and there was another half hour before bedtime, for a total of 90 minutes. Drop back a…
This Carpe Diem (KFS) wouldn’t be funny if everybody lined up their cars properly in parking lots, and so the idea that aliens would visit and start things off by being annoying gets a laugh, though perhaps the nitwits who park across the lines won’t get it. And then there are the overthinkers like me,…
David Ostow is right, and so was my professor, all those years ago. We were reading Hamlet and he led off the day’s discussion by asking what purpose the gravediggers’ scene served. Being sophomores, we knew everything, so we chattered away about rising and falling action and the need for comic relief in a tense…
Jeffrey Lindenblatt’s Paper Trends returns with a survey of the comics page of the year 2000. The Rookies, Biggest Winners and Losers, and the Ranking. ********** While Jeffrey introduced us to the rookies of 2000, Comics Kingdom introduces us to their rookie line-up. We’re celebrating “Graduation Season” at Comics Kingdom and are proud to welcome…
I’m more than a little burned out on upside-downism in cartooning about Justice Alito’s political posturing, though the immediacy with which the examples cascaded makes it more of a coincidence than a matter of redundancy, an event cartoonists once described as a Yahtzee, though I haven’t heard the term in a while. However, I like…
Sometimes you need a dose of silliness, and Jimmy Craig is just the one to deliver. This gag requires a little cultural literacy, because, first of all, you have to know who Jackson Pollock was, which isn’t all that esoteric though his paintings are. Plus it adds another chuckle to know that the story of…
Good timing award to Tommy Siegel for dropping this cartoon just before Taylormania went from fascination to exploitation. The fascination was just kind of silly. As I’ve pointed out before, Taylor Swift has been a very big deal among a very big fanbase for a very long time. The original Swifties are well out of…
I believe comics can be educational without being educational comics, and today’s Rubes (Creators) brought to mind a visit to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo when my boys were about three and seven. We had a family membership and visited often, and I think the boys learned something every time, but never so much as the…
Michael Ramirez (Creators) offers a magnificent spoof of Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation of Napoleon. Napoleon had himself crowned in the presence of Pope Pius VII but rewrote the traditional ceremony and, rather than having the pope place the crown on his head, did it himself before placing a smaller crown on the head of Josephine. That’s…
The second Saturday in May would be graduation on a lot of campuses, and it probably still is, since the ones without problems haven’t made the news. Jeff Stahler (AMS) leads off today because he states the basic issue plainly. But I need to start with a disclaimer: I skipped my graduation ceremony, because I…
Jeff Smith, David Fitzsimmons, Raymond Briggs, Lalo Alcaraz, Alex Portal, Jake Tapper Jeff Smith has a Bone to pitch Jeff Smith, he of the 1360 page, four pound graphic novel doorstop (or the easier to handle multi-volume series) has returned from a health scare. On Aug. 13, Smith had a heart attack that triggered cardiac…
By the time George Cruickshank (1792 – 1878) penned this cartoon, “teaching your grandmother to suck eggs” was an established expression for explaining something to someone who knows more about it than you do. I suppose you could call it “kidsplaining” except that kids aren’t the only ones prone to doing it. The expression has…