Industry news for the professional cartoonist
Michael Ramirez (Creators) paints as good a picture of our current situation as anyone. He’s not the first political cartoonist to depict Moses coming down from Mt Sinai to find his people in a state of idolatry, but he is more explicit in labeling their idol as conspiracies and bull and tying the delusion into…
Starting out with a point of personal privilege: As Rod Emmerson notes, Covid is becoming a greater problem in rural areas than in urban centers, and I’ve been concerned about the old home town. This report from Kaiser Health News lays it on the line: Rural Americans are dying of covid at more than twice…
Mike Luckovich takes only a small bit of artistic liberty in depicting one of the battlefields of the New Civil War. We haven’t put on uniforms and I knock wood in saying that we haven’t had anyone shot at a school board meeting. Yet. But there has been gunplay in this New Civil War, and…
Betty (AMS) has never been terribly specific about what she does for a living, but her current mood matches mine, which makes this a good day to dip into the funny pages. Meanwhile, this Bliss (AMS) reminds me of Frank Zappa’s comment, “If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll…
Sage Stossel lays out the Instagram issue, which saves me a lot of exposition and linking (click here for larger version), the main point being not that Instagram is potentially harmful to young women but that Facebook did a study in which they found out that Instagram is potentially harmful to young women and did…
Edison Lee (KFS) offers me another chance to feel old, and, gosh, real life doesn’t offer enough of those. I agree with his dad that there are all sorts of electronic doodads that I don’t need, but there’s always that nagging sense that maybe the kids are on to something. I’m getting over it. Most…
As one of the last remaining full-time newspaper cartoonists left in the U.S., I was starting to feel like a contestant on one of those reality shows. You know, something like “Last Cartoonist Inking.” And then it’s like I was kicked off the show. After 31 years drawing award-winning cartoons for my beloved hometown newspaper,…
xkcd starts us off with a cartoon that is funny but that then sends me off on a tangent. Obviously, what she proposes is not what anyone means by “putting the toothpaste back in the tube,” but I think that, if you squirted toothpaste out on the sink, you could probably get it back in…
Starting today with a meme instead of a cartoon, but one in which I quote myself from a CSotD of about a year ago which seems particularly apt. My response to Greg Kearney‘s cartoon is personal, but that illuminates the point about journalism and friends. When I was editor of a small paper in…
The past week has been one synchronicity after another. This Joy of Tech cartoon would be valid anytime, but we’re at the very start of autumn and, while the leaves have only just started turning, I am thinking about a run up the Champlain Valley and through the Adirondacks in about three weeks when the…
Here’s the problem: It’s becoming hard for political cartoonists to satirize our situation, because our situation is beginning to feel like satire itself. So Ruben Bolling lays out a mocking synopsis of how foolish people reject science, common sense and civic decency, and it feels more like a documentary than biting commentary. A very well-crafted…
Ann Telnaes notes some bad news coming out of Afghanistan, as the Taliban shows how empty its promises of respecting women turned out to be. She does well to point out the dismal situation, but there’s a question as to whether it qualifies as news, since it seems to fall under the category of “What…
The perceptive little girl in this Christopher Weyant cartoon asks an excellent question for which her father — judging by his expression — doesn’t have an excellent answer. “Read” the news, we can assume, is shorthand for “consuming” the news, for “paying attention to” the news. Actually reading the news has long been for those…
What could be more nonsensical than a MAD parody of a non-existant TV western? How about a second MAD parody of that same non-existant TV show. Tom Richmond and Andrew Secunda take on “Bounty Law” again, this time it will be part of the bonuses in the new hardback novelization of “Once Upon…
In Between Friends (KFS), Susan sometimes struggles with “older,” but she’s becoming more comfortable with “wiser,” which makes sense, since the phrase “older but wiser” suggests that the latter is compensation for the former. I prefer “older AND wiser,” and how sad if they don’t coincide. (There is, indeed, no fool like an old fool.)…