Industry news for the professional cartoonist
ICYMI, Rabbits Against Magic has it right: The Democratic Nominee has excellent taste in music, though Mingus is more jazz than swing. But the pun works and we’ll let it slide. My mother turned me on to swing. She was the first female disc jockey on Harvard’s Crimson Network, then one of the founders of…
The answer is a lot easier than Walt Handelsman expected it to be. As noted here yesterday, the stock market is largely driven by a combination of rumors and panic, as Kal Kallaugher noted in the wake of the October 1987 crash: The good news is that Wall Street followed its worst day in two…
Our theme starts with today’s Baby Blues (AMS). My first impression was that it was another “overscheduled kids” gag, which is an okay issue in general but has been done and overdone and doesn’t make me laugh anymore. So I flipped past, but then “Wait till your dad gets home” pinged my brain and I…
Some of comics’ most iconic characters found their homes in these long-running comic strips, from Dick Tracy to Beetle Bailey. In some cases, they’re icons from another era, but that doesn’t keep many of them from still appearing in newspapers today. The longest-running comics are a testament to the importance of including comic strips in…
Randall Munroe imagines himself in the Olympics in today’s xkcd, and I notice that the funniest places he’d expect to find an unqualified amateur are in the sports in which style is the deciding factor. Which evokes a 1959 Peanuts that has always been close to my heart and which, apart from my extensive history…
The news of the day is Caroline Cash beginning her turn on the Nancy comic strip. For whatever reason my first thought on seeing the first panel was The Captain and the Kids by late Rudy-John Dirks and/or The Katzenjammer Kids by late H. H. Knerr-Doc Winner. Again, I don’t know why. It’s inexplicable. This…
Scott Hilburn wins the Fortuitous Timing Award, though if he’d run today’s Argyle Sweater (AMS) 24 hours earlier, he might be up for a Pulitzer. Yes, it’s a different form of airline chaos, but given his lead time, I think he did pretty well. Besides, the types of chaos that ensued appear to have been…
Non Sequitur (AMS) manages to strike an appropriate note through serendipity, given Wiley’s lead time. Indeed, things could have gone worse and, also indeed, fate is recalculating. In any case, the second day of political cartoons about the attempted assassination have mostly indicated that we should give cartoonists a little more time, so we’ll back…
One bit of political commentary before we switch to humor: Wilbur Dawbarn’s piece reminds me of a conversation I had with my father as he pondered his future in the steel industry. He accused his contemporaries — the WWII generation — of failing to bring younger people into leadership positions, with the result that there…
My usual rule is to not feature a cartoon more than a week after it runs, but I’ve recently wound up with a collection of good pieces that got buried by more immediate issues. I’m allowed to break my own rule. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that generating cryptocurrency gobbles up a lot of…
Ted Rall was hardly the only person who, in 1995, pointed out that Bob Dole was old. And, compared to his opponent in the 1996 election, he was, given that Clinton was 50. Clinton was also the incumbent, but I felt at the time, and still believe today, that Johnny Carson’s flood of “Old Bob…
Today’s Rubes (Creators) brings back memories of being a reporter at a paper in a city on Lake Champlain, which has its own cryptozoological mascot that people honest-to-Marlin-Perkins believe in, “Champy.” A lot of people believe in him but nobody seems to have ever gotten a clear shot of him, but I do remember one…
Jeff Danziger (Counterpoint) sounds echoes of the bandwagon/Bellman effect discussed here yesterday. Yossarian was asked, “What if everyone felt that way?” and responded “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?” Understandable answer, but then again, Edmund Burke wrote, “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the…
There being no nearby Ren Faire, I had missed the uproar over elephant rides until I saw Sunday’s Brevity (AMS). Up until then, my main issue with Renaissance Festivals was that turkey legs were an anachronism and poxy drabs an annoyance. But it didn’t occur to me that elephant rides were cruel, since working elephants…
Being a collection of items about cartoonists, cartooning, and comics. Michael Cavna Wins Cartoonist and journalist Michael Cavna took a second place award in the General Features category from the Society for Features Journalism for his Washington Post profile of courtroom artist Jane Rosenberg. GENERAL FEATURE (999 words or fewer): Excellence in short feature writing…