Barbara Smaller’s cartoon is hardly breakthrough humor, subconsciously echoing as it does a Tom Toro piece that has become a classic: It is odd that they both ran in the New Yorker. As an editor, I certainly would have recognized the repetitive nature and declined to run the second iteration. OTOH, if I were editing […]
Saturday May 11, 2024 is Letter Carriers’ Stamp Out Hunger® Food Drive. Each year, letter carriers across the country head out on their routes on the second Saturday in May to collect donations of non-perishable food items to benefit local food pantries. Since launching in 1993, the National Association of Letter Carriers’ annual Stamp Out […]
Illustrators and caricaturists Robert Grossman and Steve Brodner are numbered among the 2024 inductees into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. As is Gustave Doré. Of Robert Grossman the Society of Illustrators noted: Employing his signature airbrush style, [Robert Grossman] went on to illustrate over 500 magazine covers alone. National publications that featured Grossman’s […]
I’ve often quoted a frustrated exclamation that pops up in commedia dell’arte plays, “I cannot tell if he is a knave or a fool!” The laughs in the farce are based in large part on it not being clear whether the harlequin is lying or truly believes the nonsense he spouts. It hardly matters, because […]
Major League Baseball notes: On June 1, 1925, Lou Gehrig played in the first of what would be 2,130 consecutive games, a mark that stood as the longest consecutive games played streak in MLB history until Cal Ripken Jr. played in his 2,131st on Sept. 6, 1995, to break it. Two years ago we noted […]
Garfield, FurBabies, Calvin and Hobbes, Bliss/Not Bliss/Bob Mankoff Presents, The K Chronicles, Flash Gordon, The Phantom, Popeye, caption contests, and Mike Peterson captioned. The LIFE Story of Garfield Ever since Garfield swaggered onto the pages of 41 American newspapers on June 19, 1978, the rotund feline famous for his love of lasagna, naps, and sarcastic […]
By the time George Cruickshank (1792 – 1878) penned this cartoon, “teaching your grandmother to suck eggs” was an established expression for explaining something to someone who knows more about it than you do. I suppose you could call it “kidsplaining” except that kids aren’t the only ones prone to doing it. The expression has […]
Kearney grew up in a radical FDR New Deal household in New Sharon, Maine, a town of 1,400 people. He still speaks a distinct Maine dialect and spins a good yarn. “(My family) were radical, supporters of socialists, FDR, and New Deal, and I grew up in that milieu of labor democratic politics and we […]
Ten days after The Chattanooga Times Free Press celebrated their cartoonist Clay Bennett winning the National Headliner Award they are again proudly lauding Clay’s grabbing a finalist spot in this year’s Pulitzer Prize competition in the Illustrated Reporting and Commentary competition. From The Times Free Press: This is the eighth time Bennett has been a […]
Rob Rogers (Tinyview) sets up today’s topic: If nobody knows that it happened, did it? And, if it didn’t happen, how could it matter? That fourth panel has gone from horror to comic relief as Noem attempts to move forward while backpedaling furiously. She’s gone from being proud of shooting a puppy, a goat and […]
Medar de la Cruz, contributor to The New Yorker, has been awarded the 2024 Illustrated Reporting and Commentary Pulitzer Prize for The Diary of a Rikers Island Library Worker. Judges commentary: “For his visually-driven story set inside Rikers Island jail using bold black-and-white images that humanize the prisoners and staff through their hunger for books.” […]
Before we get too far away some more comments on yesterday’s and last week’s comics. It didn’t take long for the Sunday Blondie to match the daily Blondie’s new color scheme. The new, mostly background, color approach on Blondie began with the April 22, 2024 daily comic strip. At least Dan Thompson got good use […]
I don’t know how much lead time Jimmy Craig takes for They Can Talk. I guess it’s up to him, since he’s self-syndicated, but I’ve also heard he’s working on a book, so who knows? However, the migrators have been returning to New England over the past 10 days or so. The ducks and geese […]
It’s the Silver Anniversary of National Cartoonists Day! As News18 tells it: During World War II in 1943, cartoonists including Gus Edson, Otto Soglow, Clarence D. Russell, and Bob Dunn uplifted the spirits of soldiers by performing cartoon shows in hospitals. While en route to a military base, Russell proposed the idea of forming a […]
It’s always nice, though not always possible, to begin with an overview of what is about to come. Jen Sorensen provides a solid abstract of today’s topic. Certainly, the continuing deaths in Gaza are a major crisis, for the Gazans obviously, but also for the Israelis. The BBC reports tens of thousands of Israelis in […]