Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig has passed away at the age of 79. His work appeared in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald for 55 years. Michael was born in East Melbourne in June 1945. He attended Swinburne Film and Television School with an interest in documentary film. He dipped his toes into editorial cartooning […]
Francis (AMS) leads today because, for all the bonding in a hyperconnected world, we Americans are still awfully fixated on ourselves. There was a time when one of the wire services here did a “Top 10 Stories of the Year” list each January, and they finally came under fire for including US sporting events and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Let Us Review Obituary cartoons are often cloying, unimaginative and sometimes foolishly off-target, but they are also a necessary way to help a cartoonist’s community mourn. Sometimes, however, they rise above, and Thomas Nast’s piece mourning the death of James Garfield is an example: The Statue of Liberty was so new as to not yet […]
There’s a whole lot of mental insufficiency out there, and this Clay Bennett cartoon was filed well before Chris Wallace’s astonishing, dismaying interview with the president (transcript here, video clips everywhere). The Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test is neither an IQ test nor a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory but basically a quick 10-minute test to see […]
Loretta Lockhorn speaks wisdom, and, certainly, on a Monday morning, we can step back from current events for a bit. As long as we check back once in a while to see what’s going on. Every 10 minutes should be enough. When I used to visit high schools to talk about political cartoons, I’d […]
I was up late enough last night to see the first wave of McCain obituary cartoons on Twitter and Facebook, and thought I might have to begin today’s posting with a blank frame and a disclaimer. However, Pearls came through for me, albeit by happenstance. I have no idea how Stephan Pastis feels about John […]
Fran Matera who drew the Steve Roper adventure comic between 1984 and 2004 has passed away at the age of 87. He also drew another strip Kerry Drake and comic books such as Fightin’ Marines, Speed Demons and The Hulk. From the Tampa Bay Times: He never stopped trying to put his stamp on newspapers […]
Bill Blackbeard, founder of the San Francisco Academy of Cartoon Art, has passed away at the age of 84. From Digital Spy: Born in Indiana in 1926, Blackbeard’s fascination with comics began after the discovery of a large collection of old newspapers in a neighbor’s garage. He acquired the bound copies of old newspapers kept […]