Industry news for the professional cartoonist
Last fall, I reviewed the new roll out of United Media’s comics.com and compared it to other major syndicate offerings, including uClick/Universal Press’ GoComics.com. Last month, uClick released a major upgrade/redesign to GoComics improving many of the features that were eclipsed by comics.com. uClick’s mobile friendly site. uClick has always had one of the better…
American Heritage has a great article on the original The Katzenjammer Kids – which turns 110 years old today. The original Katzenjammer Kids was a pioneer in cartooning – establishing the basic visual language used in comics today. Around the turn of the twentieth century, two popular art forms began parallel transformations. Up until that…
The Wisconsin Journal asked John Kovalic, creator of “Dork Tower“, to critique the National Security Adminstration’s kids site “I really think the characters are terrific,” responds cartoonist John Kovalic, creator of Dork Tower. “Kind of the perfect mix between Disney World and Guantanamo Bay. I can’t wait for the theme park.” He adds that “being…
I love the first panel of this Wallace the Brave (AMS) and I love Amelia because we didn’t have enough girls like her when I was a kid, though we voted one of them prom queen senior year which indicates that the appreciation of such women was present. The Angels sang “My boyfriend’s back and…
Pearls Before Swine (AMS) offers a yes-but-no discussion of our situation. There certainly are a lot of people siloed in their own little belief centers, and that’s a problem in a democratic system where people are supposed to make informed decisions. But there is such a thing as truth, and there is such a thing…
This Bob Eckstein cartoon came along at a propitious time, because I opened a Threads account and soon thereafter showed an interest in writers. Ever since, my feed has been filled with postings by people who ought to get off line and write something instead of talking about it. I took writing courses in college…
Pia Guerra David Rowe A pair of rapid responses to last night’s debate: Guerra from the Canadian West Coast, Rowe from Australia, but let’s wait to see what cartoonists who work at a more deliberate pace have to say about it, not that either of these is hasty with their graphics or their thinking. IMHO,…
How on earth, someone asked me yesterday, can the polls could be so close? My response was to ask who answers polls anymore, and everyone there admitted that they don’t respond to polls on their cell phones, leaving the answers in the hands of god knows who. Which makes Joel Pett’s imaginary pollster a hero,…
Sez Keefer: The Orange Dotard’s trip to Arlington National Cemetery and the foolishness that ensued reminded me on this classic strip by Cat cartoonist B. Kliban. I had to pay homage. Keith Knight is having fun with a cartoon classic. Check out Keith Knight’s Substack where he posts the above (th)ink cartoon and the original….
How better to welcome everyone back from Labor Day than with this Tom Toro panel? I drove 275 miles each way Saturday to visit my mother for her 100th, though her birthday was actually Sunday. As it happened, the 550-mile round-trip wasn’t so bad and I assume most drivers had left on Friday and returned…
Douglas Rodger saluted American workers with this Labor Day cartoon in the San Francisco News a century ago, but, in Chicago, my grandmother was involved in a different sort of labor, and I am rising to a point of personal privilege today. In those days, fathers were banished to the waiting room, and so in…
Ben (MWAM) raises the issue of comic sands, albeit imperfectly. Assuming he dug holes deep enough so only the boys’ shoulders and heads were out, and only wide enough to fit them exactly, they could indeed be stuck. However, comic strips often feature people buried lying down who are then unable to get out from…
There’s been a lot of chatter down in the Antipodes about the high cost of housing, and so it makes sense that Matt Golding would go international with this example of an American couple who has found a place to live rent-free. It might take you a moment to examine where they’re living to get…
Peter Steiner makes fun of grumpy wet-blanket killjoys. The New York Times, by contrast, names them Deputy Editor of its Opinion section and turns them loose on a joyful world, hoping to quash the moment and make us all become very, very serious about very, very serious things. After writing this, he went down to…
Being a collection of various items from a variety cartooning categories (kinda like the Reuben Awards). The splash page from a 1962 comic book story by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee appeared on Facebook courtesy Michael Gilbert and Jim Keefe riffed on it for his own purposes. From Mike Lynch comes a selection of Barnabas…