Industry news for the professional cartoonist
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…
David Parkins, a British-born cartoonist working for the Globe and Mail in Toronto, has captured the mood down here as the Democratic National Convention rounds up. A lot of my favorite overseas cartoonists don’t seem to quite grasp our political system, but I do keep an open mind and, given that Parkins’ political cartoons are…
This Reality Check (AMS) raises an interesting question: Do you have to be a guitar player to get the joke? My feeling is that you only need a very basic understanding of music to get a chuckle, because the G-Clef tells you it’s about music and you should know there are majors and minors that…
Mannequin on the Moon (AMS) suggests a line that some major newspapers could adopt for the benefit of readers. I find it annoying when they list a headline on their opinion page that promises a challenging, interesting opinion, but doesn’t include the byline, so that you click on it and discover that, indeed, it’s from…
We’re going to take a little break from politics today, while I recover from having spent the past week banging my head on the desk. Like the grandfather in The Buckets (AMS), I’ve been sparring with my computer and various online entities. Both the motherboard and hard drive on my desktop are in hospice, but…
A substantial portion of the public really likes Kamala Harris, but, as Phil Hands notes, the press is losing patience. Having posed the question of how she can make up for lost time with the elections so close, they aren’t very happy with her answer of taking her message directly to the public instead of…
Day by Dave (AMS) reminds us that today is National Tattoo Removal Day, and I suppose the way you react to that information could be an indication of your age. Whamond’s gag assumes a relationship between alcohol consumption, getting a tattoo and regret. The question isn’t whether that pattern exists. Of course it does. The…
Nancy, Li’l Abner, Ziggy, Crankshaft, Barney Google, Mallard Fillmore, The Shadow, Pearls Before Swine, Working Cats, Rosebuds, Goomer, Suburban Fairy Tales, and, believe it or not, even more. Rick Kogan of The Chicago Tribune was surprised to come across an old man (no, not me) reading the funny pages in a print format on a…