Industry news for the professional cartoonist
With the announcement of the end of Little Orphan Annie, Time Magazine is looking at the best long-running comics. They also allow you to order them in your order of preference. Here’s their original list: B.C. Dennis the Menace Beetle Bailey Annie The Katzenjammer Kids Gasoline Alley Blondie Dick Tracy Prince Valiant Brenda Starr
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…
Tommy Siegel offers an explanation of what happened this week, and, while foolish arrogance doesn’t explain it all, I feel free to skip politics today and just offer some laughs and general social reflection. I think the political cartoonists need some time to reflect and refocus. There have been some good responses, as seen here…
La Cucaracha (AMS) confesses to having faced lead time, but Alcaraz did a nice job of predicting where we’d be at this stage. Mind you, Alcaraz has long been on record against Latino voters who support Trump, as this political cartoon from June attests. It may be disappointing, but not surprising, that he spotted the…
Dogs and Halloween aren’t always a good combination, but today’s Bliss (Tribune) brought back a memory of a ridgeback who enjoyed dressing up. Some of my dogs have tolerated it, some haven’t, but he thought it was fun, so one time I put him in a Canadiens jersey, balanced a hockey helmet on his head…
This Buckets (AMS) is as close to the Washpo/LATimes thing as I’m getting today. As I wrote yesterday, I’m impressed that the Post has allowed so much pushback from staff, so it’s pretty clear that nobody in the front office feels they speak for the CEO. OTOH, I’m somewhat confounded by all the calls not…
Brace yourself, Willie. Here comes a flood, and it’s not just special sauce. Granted, I posted a David Rowe version yesterday, but that’s the advantage he gets with a 15-hour time difference between Sydney and New York: He slipped in ahead of the crowd. Jack Ohman — Smerconish Pat Bagley Phil Hands Nick Anderson —…
Rich Powell starts off this panoply of humor with a wordless wonder at Wide Open (Universal), and the best part is that, while the humans are blissfully unaware, the dogs recognize kindred spirits, with perhaps a sense of having been mismatched. Well, if their people have never heard that thing about people resembling their dogs,…
The Creation of the Comic Strip as an Audiovisual Stage in the New York Journal 1896-1900 Eike Exner, for Image Text, explores the origins of “sound” in late 19th Century comics of The New York Journal. Some histories of comics imply that the form started by Outcault was immediately continued by Rudolph Dirks, whose Katzenjammer…
Timing is everything, and while Jeff Stahler (AMS)‘s image of the impossibility of getting it back in the tube is hardly a new metaphor, we’re at a stage where we should be wishing there were some way to do it. It’s astounding to have a vice-presidential candidate openly admit that he is willing to tell…
Letter to The (Battle Ground, WA) Reflector: So naturally we went to the WeirdJoeKent.com website which was, we have to think, the actual purpose of writing the letter. I like the idea of local cartoonists cartooning about the local elections for newspapers or for campaigns. I don’t like that there are no credits for the…
I’ve noted in the past that for empty-nested, retired folks, holidays are when the banks are closed and there’s no mail delivery, but I’ll happily let Arlo & Janis (AMS) make the point again. The United States has two levels of federal holidays: Those we actually observe — New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day,…
Creative spelling, as seen in this Moderately Confused (AMS), is an editor’s nightmare, but one that fortunately has morphed out of control in tune with the technical revolution. I used to run honor role listings in the paper, and, for a while, I’d come across some ridiculous version of a common name and call the…