Sometimes, as discussed here yesterday, you can be too smart for the room, and that doesn’t necessarily require making jokes about the Brontë Sisters. My first response to this Prickly City (UFS) was to shrug it off, but, while it is obvious, it is also compact and concise. Granted, depicting Trump as a skunk is […]
Joel Pett lays out the litany of hate Americans are exposed to on a regular basis and ends by portraying one of the innocent victims of this toxic bile. I can’t be the only person who has so curated his social media and learned to avoid hatemongering broadcasters that I’m not bombarded with this garbage, […]
John Deering (Creators) offers a chilling combination of “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it” with the stand-up comics’ critique of being “too smart for the room.” It’s a really good cartoon, except that, in a country where half the people were born after 1982, how many of us […]
Less is more, and John Deering (Creators) has, IMHO, the best take on Andrew Cuomo because he isn’t dancing on the political grave or even pushing Cuomo into it. Nor is he going on about the statistics on nursing home deaths, a scandal that wouldn’t have disappeared but would likely have been more of a […]
I’m often impatient with Gary Markstein (Creators). He keeps up his partnership with Tony Rubino at their daily strip, “Daddy’s Home” consistently, but posts his own political commentary so rarely that I’m sometimes tempted to drop him from my GoComics lineup. However, it’s paid off this time around, because he posted this one January 12, […]
I realize it’s a case of “damning with faint praise,” but Mike Luckovich (AJC) offers the best of a bunch of happy cartoons praising the rollout of the Covid vaccine, which is a demonstration of Tolstoy’s opening of Anna Karenina that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” […]
John Cole (Times-Tribune) bemoans Bob Dylan’s decision to sell his catalog to Universal Music, and his worry that meaningful songs will become meaningless jingles isn’t off the mark. Still, Dylan is 79 and I can understand if he feels he should get his affairs in order. I guess his choices were to set up a […]
We’re entering the holiday season, which is normal, but still in lockdown mode, which, of course, is not, and Joe Heller (AMS) remarks on a year that has somehow managed to have troughs without peaks. Which is, of course, ridiculous: You can’t have troughs without peaks. It’s just that the troughs seemed very low and […]
Pros & Cons (KFS) captures the moment, or, at least, my moment. The election is still six days away, but while we’re being beseeched on all sides to jump up and panic, I’m sinking into Stan’s attitude. Things have probably been worse, and the fact that I didn’t have to live through those times doesn’t […]
Leading off with John Deering (Creators) today, not because it’s a brilliant cartoon but because it isn’t. While others are either showing an unbecoming wish for revenge or a distinctly unflattering hint of hypocrisy, Deering simply depicts the country waiting for news, with the only moral value attached being a somewhat understated element of sorrow, […]
A lady once asked him how he came to define ‘pastern’, the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as might be expected, he at once answered, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” — Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson” Sometimes the best defense is no defense at all, but for an arrogant egotist like Johnson […]
A lot of stuff to catch up on today, but I can’t hold back on this Arlo & Janis lest they no longer be first. And if this blog weren’t dedicated to saluting good work, I’d start a counter to track the number of masked jack-o’-lantern cartoons to follow. But I won’t. Though it’s okay […]
Phil Hands leads off today with a narrow accusation I want to expand into a continuing theme. The refusal to wear masks, or, more broadly, the refusal to take Covid-19 seriously, requires a level of gullibility that should boggle the mind. That is, it’s not just “bad science.” The anti-vaxxers can at least string together […]
I don’t like to say “I told you so,” because (A) it seems grandiose and (B) it would be much nicer to live in a world where someone had listened and also because (C) I wasn’t the only voice out there, so I can hardly take credit. But let’s look at what is essentially one […]
This is going to be a text-heavy blog, so let’s warm up first with a couple of cartoons. (Oh, it’s also going to feature more cartoons I disagree with than usual, but we can take that up next month in Columbus.) For instance, I greatly admire the work of Jack Ohman, but here he […]