Ian Boothby is right: Paying attention to what’s going on is not good for you. Unfortunately, failure to pay attention to what’s going on is even worse for everybody in the long run. And while there may be some dark satisfaction in schadenfreude, hoping for people to realize what they’ve wrought won’t stop what they’ve […]
Matt Pritchett has a talent for reducing complexities to simple imagery. Journalistic neutrality is a polite fiction, but it works if you take it seriously, as we once did. Walter Cronkite is often held up as the model for broadcasters. When he took off his glasses in announcing the death of JFK, or when he […]
Michael deAdder Ben Garrison We won’t get through all the emerging political cartoons about the election today, but here are the bookends: de Adder sees it as the monster returning, referencing Poltergeist, the 1982 horror film about a gateway opening up to the other side, while Garrison cites the Magnificent Seven, in which a group […]
We’ll get to knaves and fools in a minute, but first a salute to unintentional genius, as The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee (KFS) magically riffs on the McDonald’s e coli outbreak despite having been scripted and drawn well before it happened. Sometimes the Fates smile and make you look really smart, but, alas, there […]
Scott Stantis isn’t the only media person upset because Kamala Harris isn’t playing the game right, though it should be noted that he’s not one of the celebrity journalists who aren’t getting proper respect. Still, he’s right: She hasn’t made the usual rounds that aspiring politicians are expected to make, and as a result a […]
Michael de Adder offers a State of the Disunion Address for political cartooning. As noted the other day, I suspect that, while several cartoonists are of an age to have been disillusioned by the murder, the reason for the flood of OJ cartoons, most of them set in Hell, seems a desire to jump on […]
Brewster Rockit (Tribune) gets to lead off for a second day in a row, having shifted from the informational back to the absurd. As noted, I stayed home rather than driving the four hours to my old digs in the Adirondacks, and I missed both totality and a good party, but we had a nice […]
Start with an explainer from Brewster Rockit (Tribune). The strip is usually an absurdist laff-fest, but it breaks from time to time for an explanation, which goes to show that humor is funnier when the joker understands the topic. And, boy, would I like to carve that in stone. The cartoons that work are the […]
The big news this morning is about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin last night. It was so predictable that cartoonists weighed in days before it happened, which would normally be dangerous but, well, not always. Bill Bramhall widened his vision to take in the international significance, as Carlson’s fawning is tied into Republican refusal […]
The whole world is watching, and Peter Schrank indicates what the whole world is thinking, or at least the whole world aside from Russia, Hungary and North Korea, and the world who thought he was going away. That narrows it down considerably, mostly leaving us to wonder if Shrank means “madder” in the American “angry” […]
Today will be a combination of the absurd and the frightening, so we’ll start somewhere in the middle with Graeme MacKay’s commentary on the price of Christmas trees. The scout troop in our town square is selling them for $65, about the same price as the local co-op, but I haven’t checked prices elsewhere because, […]
Brazilian cartoonist Amorim (Cartoon Movement) leads us off today with a reasonable critique of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza, where Israel’s response to the horrific Hamas attacks has combined air attacks on suspected terrorist sites with warnings to civilians to evacuate an already crowded area, while food, water, fuel and electricity have been cut […]
Ann Telnaes sent me scrambling for the Googles with this one, because she’d apparently picked up on a NYTimes story I hadn’t: Clarence wants to overturn NYTimes v Sullivan so he can sue people who say mean things about him. That he wants to do it isn’t news; he’s brought that up earlier, along with […]
Confession: I didn’t watch last night’s debate. There were several reasons: One was that it didn’t appear to be on television here. The listings showed some baking contest and it occurred to me that I could record that and see if it turned out to be the debates, or if it turned out to be […]
Might as well start with a laugh, or as close as we can get to one. RJ Matson steps back from attempting to inspire horror over the lack of ethics on the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice’s refusal to take it seriously. Maybe mockery is more effective than head-on criticism. It has been said […]