Industry news for the professional cartoonist
First Dog on the Moon offers a look at the year ahead, and he’s lucky to draw the assignment, because you just sit back and wax omniscient knowing that, as he says, a year from now, nobody will remember what stupid things you predicted. People love predictions. I keep seeing a horoscope column come up…
Several comic strips have been anticipating Christmas with gags about kids trying to clean up their acts for Santa and people decorating their trees, but now we’re getting right down to the real nitty gritty, and Monty (AMS) brings up the topic of Christmas cards as we enter the home stretch. I used to get…
The best way to start today is with Paul Fell’s cartoon, which should please people who dislike sports. You don’t have to like sports, BTW, just like you don’t have to like opera or Shakespeare or raisin-oatmeal cookies. But there’s a difference between saying you don’t like ballet and wondering aloud why they don’t just…
Today’s Cornered (AMS) reminded me of my favorite Christmas tree. As I said the other day, I’ve stopped decorating now that I’m an empty-nester, but one Christmas when I had kids at home, one of my sons and I went to the hardware store to get rope so we could go buy a tree and…
Today will be a combination of the absurd and the frightening, so we’ll start somewhere in the middle with Graeme MacKay’s commentary on the price of Christmas trees. The scout troop in our town square is selling them for $65, about the same price as the local co-op, but I haven’t checked prices elsewhere because,…
Matt Davies Clay Jones By now you’ve heard that Time magazine has named Taylor Swift its Person of the Year, which I capitalize because they’ve managed to make it into a Big Freaking Deal despite a few damp squibs and obvious choices over the years. You can tell that Matt Davies has daughters, because he…
Might as well get my annual fruitcake rant out of the way. There will be a kabillion cartoons twixt now and Dec 25 about how awful fruitcake is, but in this Off The Mark (AMS), Mark Parisi gives us a close-up that explains the problem. Traditional fruitcake is a dense, dark loaf full of brown…
Red and Rover (AMS) Daddy’s Home — Creators Lola — AMS Yesterday’s comics page didn’t have a Juxtaposition so much as a three-strip pile up. One might suspect that all of the comic strip people live in the same town, but Red and Rover don’t even live in the same year as the others, being…
When the little newspaper on Long Island revealed the cascade of lies under which George Santos was elected, it touched off a storm of political cartoons and memes and jokes and not a lot more. Kevin Kallaugher sidesteps the new rash of “Santos is gone” cartoons to focus on why Santos is gone and what…
Ah, if only it were as simple as this! David Horsey is being sarcastic, because, of course, the destruction of the temple and the dispersal of Jews from the Holy Lands didn’t end the crisis of the Diaspora. The problem is that, while that event was cataclysmic, it was not definitive. That is, it’s a…
Zits (KFS) is starting a story arc that could mark a shift in the comic, with Jeremy and presumably his friends beginning the college search. The strip has a glacial pace, but that’s better than no pace at all, and, over the years, we’ve seen the kids get drivers licenses and cars and even a…
Between our shifting servers and an apparent post-holiday sag in general, this has become a good day to indulge in some favorite comics from years past. This Rhymes with Orange (KFS) came at a particularly propitious time, because not only did I live just around the corner from such a house, but I recall that…
My goodness but 1948 was a fabulous year for cartoons! We were emerging from the war and feeling pretty good, but not yet arrogant, about ourselves. And newspapers still featured things like cartoons that their readers wanted. Fancy that! As a result, this will be a longer than usual posting, and I hope you enjoy…
Back in “the good old days” of the adventurous decade daily comic strips ran, more than less, four panels wide. World War Two with its material reductions basically ended that and by the 1950s three panels became the norm. These days two panels seem more common than three for adventure and other continuity strips. And…
This is apt to be a tough week for finding outstanding comics, given the flood of Roz-at-the-Pearly-Gates pieces already flooding the zone, plus the mandatory Thanksgiving cartoons. Nothing against Roz, mind you. Great gal. But I can’t imagine anyone breaking any new ground and, so far, I haven’t seen anything surprising or worth featuring here….