Industry news for the professional cartoonist
I don’t mind the fact that I often disagree with cartoonists and other political commentators. Not only does it give me something to write about, but I’d be suspicious of a system in which everyone agreed with everyone else, mostly because there’s never been one. Still, I think it’s possible for everyone to agree, for…
I might have saved this Non Sequitur (AMS) for a day of political cartooning, but, instead, I’m using it to introduce a comedy/editorial mashup. We’ve always had “alternative facts,” but we’ve only weaponized them recently. There were people who believed fluoride was a communist plot and that Elvis was alive, but they were dismissed as…
Or should it be running “amok?” Writing Explained pulls a Garner’s Modern English Usage (GMEU) estimate “that amok is used three times for every use of amuck, which is corroborated by the graph below.” Writing Expalined continued: “amuck was preferred up until the 1940s, but since that time, amok has overtaken it as the standard…
Lisa Benson (Counterpoint) not only points out the bizarre self-inflicted punishment the GOP is laying upon itself, but her stack of round cards demonstrates the challenge of keeping up with a story that seemingly has no ending. As of this morning, we’re up to 11 rounds of pointless posturing, and even if they resolve things…
Timing may not be everything, but it’s a lot of things, and today’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee (KFS) lands the day after I saw someone observing on social media that the Community Chest card in Monopoly teaches kids to rely on government handouts if they get in trouble. 24 hours later, my response…
The upcoming holiday here, announced on the main site, not only gives me my first break in a dozen years or so — at least the first break that didn’t include major surgery — but relieves me of having to pick and choose among “New Year’s Resolution” gags, very few of which come up to…
Lola (AMS) starts off a post-Christmas posting with a decidedly non-Christmas gag, since Frosty the Snowman is no more a Christmas carol than is Jingle Bells or Winter Wonderland or the dreaded Susie Snowflake. But on a day otherwise awash in jokes about returning unwanted gifts and misinterpreting the meaning of “Boxing Day,” it seems…
The Barn (Creators) gets today’s Excellent Timing Award for a piece done, no doubt, weeks in advance but that happened to hit just as a substantial portion of the country fell into a Frosty Bombalooza or whatever they’re calling it these days. We used to call them “cold snaps” but perhaps we were being too…
Non Sequitor (AMS) offers a non-controversial chuckle to start a day of myth-busting, because, yes, it would be nice if Parks & Rec also offered scooping this time of year, along with plowing a path. Our normal leash-free zone closes in winter, but we’ve got an alternative area, the driveway to which does get plowed…
Sherman’s Lagoon (AMS) on the demise of the Christmas Newsletter. Yesterday, I talked about the fables that passed as history in ancient times, but those dubious paeans to powerful leaders had nothing on the self-congratulatory fiction that once poured forth in the form of Christmas Newsletters. Their chief attraction was how much fun it was…
Clay Bennett (CTFP) manages, alas, to capture the spirit of Christmas, 2022, though I’d like it just as much without the Trump sign. I don’t disagree: That side of the divide is definitely peddling hostility, no doubt about it. Still, it is Christmastime, and I’m reminded of one of Confucius’s Analects, “I suppose I should…
What the hell were you thinking? Oh, wait. I wasn’t going to ask that. It’s never helpful and it assumes a fact not in evidence. It’s also redundant, considering that the people who — as Adam Zyglis puts it — dumped their college savings, vacation money and retirement nest egg down the crypto rat hole…
I’ve long thought that “This Time It’s Personal” should have been a category in Jumping the Shark, a point at which you knew the writers had given up and the show was over, like the time on ER when Julianna Margulies became a hostage in a store that was being robbed and we were treated…
Today’s Pickles (AMS) reminds me that this is a time of year when I am thrilled to be retired. There is a news gap between Christmas and New Years when there is nothing to report on except for accidents, murders, fires and suchlike, which sounds like a lot but isn’t, though I suppose now that…
Candorville (KFS) pokes some fun at its former hosting site, but, for those who haven’t been following DD Degg’s coverage here, the outage at GoComics seems to have fouled up their ability to receive and process strips, such that they’re featuring a lot of reruns at the moment. This makes it hard to take a…