Industry news for the professional cartoonist
Juxtaposition of the Date (Andy Marlette – Creators) (Walt Handelsman) I remember taking angry phone calls in the newsroom on a December 7 in the early ’90s because we hadn’t acknowledged the date on Page One. It wasn’t my decision: I only got the calls because, as the business writer, I was there before…
We ran an obituary for cartoonist Jerry Palen last week. But… Many people knew him as a fellow rancher, others through his iconic characters Elmo and Flo in his syndicated comic strip “Stampede,” the most widely syndicated cartoon in both the U.S. and Canada. Still others will remember Jerry Palen as the sculptor, artist…
This is one of those days where it doesn’t much matter where we start, but Alex got both a laugh and a nod, and that’s the overall goal. The headhunter goes on for half the strip about the importance of modern thinking and how it impacts old duffers like Clive, but, in the end, well,…
Jack Ohman (WPWG) notes the obvious lack of consistency in the pro-life movement, which has a dominant foothold on the Supreme Court. Whether it rises to the level of conscious hypocrisy or is more along the lines of willful blindness really doesn’t matter to that woman clinging to the overturned Roe boat (a nice and…
Some days are political, some days are comical. Today is a mix, but we’ll start with the shock of Michael Ramirez (Creators) pointing out that Marjorie Taylor Greene is an embarrassment to the Republican Party. Constant Readers will know I often disagree with Ramirez, but he doesn’t simply illustrate talk radio nonsense and this is…
Monty (AMS)‘s pal Moondog is still hauling a turkey around and aren’t we all? Thanksgiving leftovers are something people in cartoons complain about but that I suspect people in real life not only don’t mind but actually enjoy. The microwave really shines this time of year, when you can quickly recreate Thanksgiving dinner in miniature,…
A bit of Black Friday humor from Frazz (AMS) to mark the day. I’m having a little trouble with shopping options, given, as Frazz notes, that the era of the shopping mall is pretty well dead. It sure didn’t last long, given the investment involved, but, then, it was a dubious concept to begin with:…
Dave Granlund points out that Thanksgiving, as a national holiday, was not about Pilgrims. It would be nice to say that it was instituted to give thanks that the Civil War was over, but, in fact, it was declared in the midst of the conflict. Note that Sarah Josepha Hale, when she asked the president…
Usually any book missed in the monthly Hey Kids! Comics! checklist would wait to be noted in the following month’s entry, but this one is too important (and deserves separate documentation anyway). PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED A Memoir By Edward Sorel The book from Penguin Random House is now available! Alongside more than 172 of his drawings,…
This Jeff Stahler (AMS) cartoon greets me appropriately upon my return from Younger Son’s home in Minnesota, where I had Thanksgiving a week early with his family of four, another granddaughter and her husband, and my ex, all of whom live there. I heartily recommend it, because the flights were cheaper, though you might want…
Ray Billingsley didn’t much like his second-floor Harlem home on Bradhurst Avenue back then. It was affordable — this being the mid-’80s — but he felt isolated, and he knew crime was a threat: “One evening while in bed with the window open, I actually heard three guys planning on burglarizing my apartment.” Yet this…
In case you haven’t flown in two years or so, it hasn’t changed much, or, at least, there were no fistfights on my plane and nobody had to be subdued and duct-taped into their seat. Nor, despite Mike Twohy’s New Yorker cartoon prediction, did anyone seem to get agitated about seatbacks. I reclined just enough…
In one of his most celebrated paintings, O the Roast Beef of Old England, William Hogarth appears as himself, sketching the fortifications at Calais at the very moment of being mistakenly arrested as a spy in 1748. It is not what you would call a subtle scene. The raggedy French soldiers are on their last…
Jeff Koterba starts us off with a “Yes, but No” take on Michael Flynn’s bizarre declaration that the US is and must be a Christian nation. Yes, the nation was founded on the principle of freedom of (and from) religion: Any fair reading of the Founders, and any literate reading of the Constitution, makes that…
I had some deep thoughts today but realized I’ve shared enough deep thoughts lately and I’m not in the mood. So here is our deepest thought of the day, from Red and Rover (AMS), and it fits my mood that it comes from a dog. Nothing against dogs, mind you. I appreciate their ability to…