Redrawing the Western: A History of American Comics and the Mythic West by William Grady (2024) Nearly 50 years after Maurice Horn’s Comics of the American West we get another book charting “the Western genre in American comics from the late 1800s through the 1970s and beyond.” By the time comic strips came along the […]
Morten Morland offers the most sweeping, and chilling view of things to come, in the way billionaires are lining up to not just pay homage to, but to pay, the incoming president. I’d like to think I’d be just as appalled if a president with whose intentions I agreed were getting all these massive donations, […]
Gideon Kibet (aka Kibet Bull), a university student, social media influencer and cartoonist who’s work has been critical of Kenyan President William Ruto, has been reported missing and is feared to have been abducted. His brother was disappeared four days earlier. Kibet was last seen visiting presidential aspirant Okiya Omtatah on December 24. Today, Omtatah, […]
From the day after Christmas and into the New Year we will see newspapers’ and websites’ collections of “the year in review” featuring editorial cartoons from the past year chosen by the cartoonists or their editors. Let’s get started: From WhoWhatWhy comes the Best Jon Richards Cartoons of 2024 The Toronto Star presents The year […]
Today is Boxing Day or St. Stephen’s Day or Wren Day (Lá an Dreoilín) or, as I call it, the point when if I haven’t used a cartoon yet it’s probably become irrelevant because they’ve all been about Christmas for the past three weeks. Fiona Katauskas takes an appropriately irreverent and silly look at Boxing […]
Schulz, the man who birthed the lovably hard-luck Charlie Brown, was known to have wrestled with self-doubt. Yet when it came to taking the reins of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in 1965, the “Peanuts” creator was a thinker of unwavering confidence and cool-headed belief, his longtime screen collaborator and late producer Lee Mendelson — who […]
Christmas with Will Eisner, C. E. Mondfort, Joe Kubert, Walt Kelly, Bill Watterson, and many more. Newspaper cartoonists have been celebrating Christmas since The Nineteenth Century. We, however, will remain a bit closer to our times. In the comic book newspaper insert of the 1940s, commonly called The Spirit Section, Will Eisner regularly celebrated Christmas […]
You’ll note Santa’s helmet at the left. This banner was from 1944, 80 years ago, six months after D-Day and right in the heart of the Battle of the Bulge, which explains the light in the window at the right. The war was also in the heart of most comic strips on Christmas that year. […]
The Mail on Sunday’s peerless cartoonist Stan ‘Mac’ McMurtry has been chosen as an Oldie of the Year. Praised for ‘making news pages brighter by putting in a laugh’, 88-year-old Mac was selected for The Oldie magazine’s award, alongside former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, also 88; film director Mike Leigh, 81; and actress Nanette Newman, […]
A mischievous cartoonist landing an invite to the White House? It could only have happened during the heyday of the daily comics page. Throughout the 1980s, a series of spirited young strips — including “Bloom County,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Cathy,” “The Far Side,” and “For Better or Worse” — together drew hundreds of millions of […]
Christmas Eve, that is. Not to be confused with the Turgenev novel, though his portrait of over-educated Russian intellectuals dithering around as the rest of Europe explodes in revolution seems sadly relevant at the moment. But we’ll get back to that, and, if we don’t, it will get back to us. As Fiona Katauskas says, […]
SuprDee Parson, Jack Davis, Bill Watterson, Liz Climo. Plus notable comic strip compilations for 2024 and an animation In Memorial for those we lost in 2024. ANDERSON, Ind. — The bonds and rivalries of three sisters are the focus of a comic strip that is now syndicated in newspapers around the country. The comic behind […]
Saturday’s Alley Oop held out the promise of an actual adventure. Monday’s Alley Oop hasn’t disabused me of that hope. We’ll see. I could very well be wrong, it wouldn’t be a first, but I think last week was the first full week of Slylock Fox dailies that had Scott Underwood co-signing with Bob Weber, […]
Wallace the Brave (AMS) and Spud the … um … the Spudacious … offer a holiday take that breaks through the usual seasonal noise. And speaking of noise, I’d rather have a couple of kids come by with an absurd but amusing rap than hear Musak at the store in which nameless singers flail at […]
Gag cartoonist Wayne Horne has passed away. Wayne Laverne Horne September 29, 1927 – December 21, 2024 From the obituary: Wayne Laverne Horne, a talented artist, cartoonist, and graphic designer, passed away peacefully on December 21, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona, at the age of 97. Born on September 29, 1927, in Omaha, Nebraska, Wayne lived […]