I’ll save the other Memorial Day cartoons for later, but Ed Hall provides a fitting starting point for looking at yesterday’s vote, in which the GOP spared us the painful burden of proving that there was no insurrection, that it was, in fact, BLM and Antifa crisis actors pretending to be Trump supporters peacefully behaving […]
This Reply All (WPWG) ran a couple of days ago, but it anticipated yesterday’s CDC announcement that you can stop masking if you’ve been vaccinated. The announcement has been greeted with joyous political cartoons, but over in Stripland it means we’re going to discover a lot of cartoonists’ lead times because there will continue to […]
Carpe Diem (KFS) inadvertently captures my mood. Or perhaps I’m just not the only one who feels there is way too much doom in doom-scrolling these days. Three days after the invention of the wheel, somebody scrawled a picture on the cave wall of a man with that wheel just outside the doorway, and children […]
We’re starting to move kids back into the schoolrooms, and Signe Wilkinson (AMS) questions the wisdom of the move. There are many layers of this issue, and “Follow the science” is deeply tangled up with “Follow the sociology.” Joe Heller takes a similarly skeptical view of the development. Is it science, or is it […]
It used to be a tradition this time of year to break the fourth wall and wish readers a Merry Christmas, these being some examples by classic strips back in 1925. I didn’t see many examples today, though it may be that, come next Friday, more cartoonists will do that. It’s a clumsy situation […]
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 […]
Rick McKee starts off the discussion with a simple, time-tested fact, which is that people believe what — but mostly who — they want to believe. Some of it is trivial. Most kids become suspicious about Santa Claus early on, and figure it out for themselves, sometimes with a friend bursting a bubble that was […]
Marty Two Bulls certainly has standing to make this observation, but I would point out that he’s saying something less about “cancel culture” and more about honest history. That’s not to say that a frank reassessment of our history might not require some adjustments, including settling some land claims in the case of Indians, and […]
A bit of cautionary wisdom from Arlo for anyone who hasn’t noticed that whatever crazy was out there to start with has really flourished in the current crisis. Someone the other day was making excuses for Costco Ken, that belligerent fellow who was threatening an old lady who wanted him to wear a mask, stepping […]
I’m kind of sorry I used up Stephen Dedalus’s line from “Ulysses,” “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” in a headline a few weeks ago, because here’s Matt Wuerker painting Uncle Sam as a reluctant dreamer awakening to a new reality. Then again, Joyce seems to have been above the […]
Bob Moran and I appear to be on opposite sides of the “tearing down statues” issue, but his commentary opens the question to a potentially fruitful discussion. The matter is more complicated in Britain not simply because they have more history to process but because, over here, we’ve focused on a relatively straight-forward false-history concocted […]
RJ Matson offers a great take on “Blind Justice.” Blind Justice is an ideal that we’ve never achieved. The idea of a system in which everyone who comes before it gets equal treatment, in which Justice does not see who is on either side, is something to strive for even if we know in our […]
Juxtaposition of the Day (Bob Gorrell) (Tom Toro, June 2012) And let me add that those who pretend to study history talk about the riots of 1968 in terms of the tumultuous demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention that summer. Which were not riots except in the sense of “police riots,” stirred up by Mayor […]
We’ll take a break for a review of what I’m going to call a “provocative book,” a graphic history of the women’s suffrage movement through the eyes, and pens, of 32 female cartoonists. And let me start by recommending you buy a copy: You can purchase a PDF now or preorder a print version (August […]
Arlo plays the old gaffer yet again. I was going to make a joke about how “Seven O’Clock Straight Up” means “without ice,” but, then again, we’re living in a world where people assume a martini is made with vodka. And I grew up in a world in which not only is a martini, by […]