Industry news for the professional cartoonist
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…
Jeff Koterba shows that less is more with a simple response to Brittney Griner’s release. The ball/ball-and-chain transposition is solid without being excessively clever and he doesn’t presume the result of the throw. More important, he doesn’t argue over whether half a loaf is, indeed, better than none, but celebrates an American homecoming. Granted, it’s…
One of my first memes, from back when a man with a hammer declared “Mission Accomplished” before several thousand American kids, and several hundred thousand Iraqis, died to prove him wrong. This morning, we are beleaguered with cartoons featuring bloody hammers, and I’d have had a tough time sorting through them if more of them…
We’ll start the day with a little crossover from the funny pages, because Snuffy Smith (KFS) sets the tone for a discussion of spin, lies and foolish belief, and I like Snuffy’s contention that it’s an issue of good judgement. There is genuine dishonesty, of course, but there is also genuine stupidity and genuine self-deception,…
Dr. MacLeod comments on the latest round of executions and self-immolation from Gannett, and I promise not to go into yet another rant about how Wall Street owners don’t care about the product, only about the profits, not because it isn’t central to the problem but because I’ve said it so often that it has…
As is often said here, the “bland restatement” technique of cartoons like This Modern World is often a problem, since the absurd things the characters say are not far off from things actually being said. That’s true of this piece, but the hyperbole of Trump being in possession of an actual nuclear weapon, rather than…
The Comics Journal released its obituary of Paul Coker, Jr. today. Comics historian and Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago does a great job by Coker. This has perhaps the best accounting of Paul’s early career at Hallmark Cards. One of his first clients, the Kansas City-based Hallmark, hired him as a staff designer in…
Since I don’t follow Canadian politics closely, I’m not sure if the Fat Cat in Bruce MacKinnon’s commentary on the plan to raise interest rates is anyone in particular, but it doesn’t matter: The rich powerful guy is making major decisions about global policies and the homeless guy is just worried about his next meal….
In order to start a day of mythbusting on an apolitical note, here’s a cartoon Rich Powell shared on Facebook the other day, though I note by the date that he drew it some time ago. It’s about the nursery rhyme about little piggies, used, as demonstrated in this 1857 painting by Lilly Martin-Spencer, to…
Ben Jennings starts us off because I simply like the way he offers a visual depiction of how inflation feels to consumers. That’s more than sufficient, given that the point of cartooning is to put concepts into graphic form. But I also like that he’s not trying to hang it around the neck of Boris…
It was seven years ago today that presidential candidate Donald Trump rode down an escalator to the cheers of a crowd it later turned out had been hired rather than simply assembled, which is hardly surprising, given that he was not a minor politician stepping up into a major campaign. He had plenty of fans,…
Let’s start the day with a grim chuckle from Wiley Miller, because, while today’s Non Sequitur (AMS) is funny, it’s not. Whatever the lead time for his strip, this was safe commentary, because we’re seeing book after book come out from both former White House apparatchiks and reporters who covered the Trump administration, explaining all…
We’ll start off with a major hit from Pedro Molina (Counterpoint), who skips all the cleverness and simply portays Replacement Theory for what it is: A perverse way in which racism masquerades as patriotism. Sometimes you can be too clever. The first time I saw a cartoon pointing out that Europeans had replaced Indians on…
As DD Degg reports, the Pulitzer Prize folks have awarded a medal to a group of artists and editors who produced a long-form, non-fiction, illustrated report on the suppression of Uyghurs by the Chinese government. I think that’s a good thing, though I haven’t changed in my general distain for awards. Winning a Pulitzer used…
Kevin Siers offers a dire warning by juxtaposing the reality of the pending SCOTUS decision with the imagined assurance that it’s just this one thing. Well, it’s just this one thing that, in and of itself, is going to kill women, given that Louisiana is already pushing a bill that would even outlaw abortion in…