Industry news for the professional cartoonist
I would have used this Existential Comics discussion yesterday if I’d realized the concept of theft and/or compensation was going to be debated in the comments. I like our comments section and appreciate that the great bulk of entries are genuine conversation, whether I agree with them or not. But theories don’t pay the rent….
Glad I didn’t use this Pearls Before Swine (AMS) when it appeared Sunday, because there has been an explosion of conversations about art and ethics in the days since. Not, mind you, that this is the first time the issue of purchasing vs downloading music has come up. Doonesbury devoted a week to the topic…
The National Cartoonists Society Foundation is setting up a charity auction, with dozens of NCS members offering original art to benefit the foundation. The original art for 2023 NCS Reubens by Sam Viviano and for the 1987 paperback by Bil Keane are among the treasures offered. They are just two of the items. Others include…
Matt Groening and Life in Hell, Bruce Petty and the Vietnam War, Etta Hulme and Comic Books, Art Evans and College Mascots, Carl Jones and The Boondocks, Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers and Roses in December. Before there was Homer, there was Binky Everyone knows that The Simpsons is what made Matt Groening one of…
Sometimes it’s easy to call out a cartoonist. In this case, given that, in his profile statement at Counterpoint, Mike Beckom boasts of deliberately insulting people and being insensitive to their feelings, and styles himself as “not politically correct” at his Twitter page, it’s not out of bounds to assume his mockery of Hawaiian culture…
On the topic of things you shouldn’t have to be told, Gary Varvel (Creators) depicts a kid gleefully heading off to the College of His Choice, leaving a pair of apparently bankrupt parents behind. He’s got a point, given that the kid is headed for State U and not Rich Kid Private Emporium, because even…
Cartoonist Virginia Lindemann has passed away. Virginia Louise (Ginny) Lindemann December 12, 1944 – June 28, 2023 From the obituary: Ginny attended Stafford Hall School of Business, Summit, N.J. and Farleigh Dickinson University, Madison, N.J. where she majored in Art and given many awards for her Oil Paintings. Ginny was an Executive Secretary in N.J.,…
In case you missed it, Paul Fell summarizes the growing, and increasingly official, war on the free press. On one hand, we have a Civil War festering within the nation, by which I mean without the benefit of one set of states going off in one direction and another set staying put. Instead, the rebels…
Matt Golding starts us off with this cheerful vision, and, while exaggeration is one of the main tools of political cartooning, this is less a case of exaggeration than it is of, as the phrase goes, “saying the silent part out loud.” While he didn’t intend a two-part comic, Golding returned to the overall theme…
For those who believe in choice, and democracy, and who aren’t hoping to live under a repressive government, there’s a great deal of positive hope to be found in Bill Bramhall’s depiction of the GOP obsession with restrictive abortion laws. This isn’t just about Ohio’s recent attempt to get people to stop trying to tell…
Life between the ages of 15 and 20 seems purposely geared to be annoying. In my case, those years coincided with Get Smart, which Jack Davis drew here and it’s always fun to feature his work. Get Smart itself, however, began as a clever sitcom but then became repetitive and predictable, which would have been…
Brewster Rockit (Tribune) surprised me the other day, because there’s nothing wrong, or particularly odd, about mixing peanut butter and jalapenos. Elder son used to scoop out the seeds, stuff the raw pepper with peanut butter and choff it on down, and I’ll admit it’s a tasty snack, though I’ve got a rule about only…
David Harper from 2019: I’ve discovered many comics I love through the Anchorage Public Library’s incredible comic collection, as they have an immense assortment of manga, hugely popular titles like Saga and The Walking Dead, comics from the wider European continent like Blacksad and The Incal, indie fare like Duncan the Wonder Dog and Giant Days,…
Candorville (KFS) offered this portrait of fact-free criticism Sunday, and not only did the familiarity bring a chuckle, but it happened to coincide with both a discussion here about conservative cartoonists and an email exchange with two other cartoonists, who pondered the question of whether conservative commentators have bothered to read the indictments against Donald…
Patrick Blower cites the new Civil War, in which a divided country rages around a vestige of the old Civil War. As noted here before, it was much easier when we had a geographical division based, for the most part, on a single, definable issue. Even then, there were as many quarrels over why we…