Earth Day in the comic strips

King Features Syndicate cartoonists did Earth Day strips today. Dave Astor's got the story.

In the Washington Post, one can see Mutts (themed strips all week since last Sunday), On the Fastrack, Curtis, Hagar the Horrible, Amazing Spider-Man (just a blurb), Blondie, Mark Trail, Dennis the Menace, The Family Circus, Frazz, Mother Goose and Grimmm, Sally Forth, Beetle Bailey, Zits, Prickly city, Judge Parker, Baby Blues and Zippy the Pinhead.

In the Washington Times, one can see Crock, Mallard Fillmore and Bizarro. Funky Winkerbean just had a sign on the school's notice board for its Earth Day strip.

April 25: Tony Rubino on Washington Post chat

Join Washington Post Comics page editor Suzanne Tobin on Friday, April 18 at 1 p.m. ET for a discussion with "Daddy's Home" creator Tony Rubino at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/04/15/DI2008041502007.html.

WashingtonTimes still polling about comics

A comic strip?

Brian, a friend at work saw this in an antique store in New Orleans and took this picture for me.

After mulling it over for a week and talking to two other historians of medicine who write on comics, I called up and ordered it. I haven't printed it yet, but flopping and inverting the picture lets you see it:


So it's a printing block for a fundraising ad campaign for the March of Dimes to conquer polio. Pretty neat especially the iron lung in the center. I'm going to try to ink it and print it, and we'll see what results I get. Perhaps we can make prints as write-in prizes!

Onion swings at Marmaduke

This article's in the paper edition that's out now too - Some Old Man Still Churning Out Marmaduke, Onion March 14, 2008 | Issue 44•11.

Washington Times comics survey

The Times actually has a pretty good comics page. I frequently pick it up in Walter Reed's lobby and tear it out for Michigan State's collection. Harry Bliss' panel is particularly interesting since he'd been known as a New Yorker cartoonist before starting this, but also has been doing children's books. I don't know why they put this on their website, but not in the paper though. Seems to defeat the purpose of it...

Calling all funnies afficionados

The Washington Times is evaluating the items on our Comics page, and we'd like your input.

As it stands, we've got 17 comic strips running on our page. We want to know what you like, what you don't like and even what you feel we're missing.

Our collection ranges from a playful pair of fraternal twins and their grandmother in Grand Avenue to the saucy quips of Fred Basset and the motherly musings of Rose is Rose.

We've also got the indomitable Crankshaft, the geeky but genial Monty and the lovable pup Buckles.

And of course, we've got the daily high school dramas in the long-running Funky Winkerbean, The Buckets' family foibles and the good-natured ribbings of Herb & Jamaal .

The dashing Dick Tracy sniffs out criminals on our page, and the characters of Crock lampoon society and each other out in the desert while the cavemen of B.C. escape the jaws of dinosaurs.

Our Rubes strip is biting but side-splitting, and Bizarro is, well, bizarre.

Rounding out our team is the intrepid maid Hazel, the self-titled strip of Harry Bliss and feline frolicking in Cats With Hands.

For the next two weeks, we're asking our readers to e-mail us the names of their four favorite comic strips. We'd also like to know which ones don't tickle your funny bone and even the names of 'toons we aren't running but are worth a look.

Please send your comments to comics@washingtontimes.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

--Carrie Sheffield, Web editor, The Washington Times

Posted on March 11, 2008

Comics with stories beyond the 4th wall in today's Post

Dilbert refers back to a worker who was fired for posting a Dilbert strip on a bulletin board at work. Dave Astor's got more details than I can bother with.

Baldo's creators tip a hat to Gus Arriola, the cartoonist for Gordo who died earlier this month. R.C. Harvey's book on Arriola and Gordo is still in print and is probably the easiest to find if you want to know more.

Silver Spring's Adventure House publishes comic strip biography

I ran into the publisher Adventure House at a con last weekend and talked to him for a while. In addition to the stunning Alex Raymond book pictured here, I've been buying his reprints of the Shadow regularly. Both the Shadow and Doc Savage have new material written by pulp historians Anthony Tollin and Will Murray.

Adventure House also has a couple of pulp reprints relating to comic strips - pulp version of Tailspin Tommy #2 from January 1937 and Don Winslow of the Navy #2 from May 1937. I'm a big fan of comics novelizations, even though they're frequently so-so, and was quite please to be able to buy these. I bought this too - Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps - on sale for half-price!

Post on comic strip collective action

The Post has picked up on the February 10th collective protest by cartoonists of a darker shade of pale - "Cartoonists to Protest Lack of Color in the Comics," by Teresa Wiltz, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, February 6, 2008; C01. The protest is largely the idea of local cartoonist Corey Thomas who does 'Watch Your Head.'

I'm afraid I agree with the opinions that Gene Weingarten expressed in his chat update today, although I like Baldo and La Cucaracha well enough. Boondocks' McGruder's comments in the initial article are interesting too - unfortunately I don't think a lot of the college cartoonists are able to sustain their strip. I was a fan of Watch Your Head when the Post tried it out, but it's become a real one-note strip.

Chatalogical Humor by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, February 5, 2008; 12:00 PM

Gene Weingarten: Here's an interesting piece in today's Style section, about a planned protest by cartoonists-of-color.

I sympathize with these guys, and many of them produce good strips that are victims of a de facto quota system. But there's a difficult truth that undercuts their argument. In devastating economic times, newspapers are (unwisely, I believe) ruthlessly squeezing the life out of their comics pages. So there is plenty of pandering going on in all directions -- a naked, desperate effort to appeal to every possible perceived constituency -- and that has nothing to do with racism. With limited space, there are quotas for everything. Believe me, the only reason newspapers run the painfully bad Prickly City is that they feel they need to offer a conservative voice on the page, to counterbalance the lefty Doonesbury, Candorville Nonsequitur, etc. The only reason newspapers run Dennis the Menace and Beetle Bailey and Classic Peanuts is to appeal to the oldsters who they believe would feel lost without these mild, mealy things. Family Circus is for very, very young readers, and preposterously stupid adults, and lovers of camp humor. This appeal-to-all-demographics impulse leaves very little room for ANYONE to break into a newspaper.

There is another factor undercutting their argument: For some, the despicable quota system has worked splendidly. The only reason The Post runs the weak Baldo is that the pandering alternative is the weaker La Cucaracha.

It's a pretty bad situation all around.

Comics of the Day blog rates the Post's comics

Richard Thompson sent over this link to the Comics of the Day blog- I'd say he's worried about appearing on it, but we all know the Post doesn't run the daily Cul de Sac! Actually as I look at the site more closely he's got a positive 3 rating - tied with Pickles. Better try harder, Richard.

Comic strip collections reviewed in Sunday's Post

See "Extra, Extra: Vintage Strips Rise Again," Reviewed by Dougas Wolk, Washington Post Book World Sunday, January 13, 2008; BW08.

Feb 10: Black cartoonists work a theme

See "Black Cartoonists Plan Feb. 10 Comics-Page Action," by Dave Astor, E and P Online January 8, 2008. Several of these strips are published in the Post including Candorville and Watch Your Head. Curtis by Ray Billingsly is also in the Post, but not mentioned in the article.

Post letter on shrinking comics

Shrunk!
Washington Post Saturday, January 5, 2008; Page A15

Regarding the recent changes to the Comics pages:

Why not just eliminate the comics altogether? That would be far more humane than shrinking them to the extent that you have. Many readers, children included, have less than perfect eyesight; many of us now need magnifying glasses to read your comics. Our family has always enjoyed "Slylock Fox" together, but none of us can now "find the six differences" in the shrunken panels. This is almost sadistic and an affront to readers paying to subscribe to material we are now unable to read.

-- C. Randall Williams

Something to do on Jan 1

At the Renwick Gallery near the White House, the exhibit "Going West! Quilts and Community" has a Comics Quilt, circa 1935, with a bunch of comics characters sewn into it. It's on loan from the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer.

Another option would be the Uncle Scrooge and Carl Barks show that opened right before Christmas at Geppi's Entertainment Museum. I plan on seeing that in January myself.

Weingarten on Post's comics shenanigans

In his December 18th Chatalogical Humor chat, Gene Weingarten said,

"Yes, I hate the new Sunday comics squeeze, too. It's bad and I hate it. And I hate that Weekend is losing Tom The Dancing Bug, one of the few remaining strips with a brain.

Hate, hate, hate."

with reader responses of an outpouring of love for Tom the Dancing Bug, and:

Hate, Hate, Hate: Opus has been shrunk to one quarter of its original size. Need reading glasses......

Get down to comics and smack the individual responsible!

Gene Weingarten: They don't listen to me.

and:

Washington, D.C.: Tom the Dancing Bug is going away?! I'd cancel my subscription if I had one. I certainly won't get another subscription now. I had been considering going Friday through Sunday only, but not anymore. What's going in his space? More crap to entertain the dozen kids in the area who don't watch tv nonstop?

Gene Weingarten: I dunno. I am upset.

and:

Bethesda, Md.: Why is Weekend dropping Tom the Dancing Bug? That's the smartest strip around. Can't they move it to Outlook or somewhere else? Should we riot?

Gene Weingarten: I would never personally endorse a riot. In fact, inciting to riot is a crime. So I would never personally endorse RIOTING. But some action is in order short of rioting.

and:

Tom the Dancing Bug:...is available Thursday on Salon.com -- in color no less.

Gene Weingarten: Noted. Boy, I hate posting this. DON'T READ THE POST, READ SALON!

Wash Post apparently doesn't get any favorable letters about comics

Or doesn't run them if it does. In "Your Pique Grows While Your Comics Shrink"
Saturday, December 15, 2007; Page A19, the two letters about the comics read:

My family's peaceful, serene ritual of reading the Sunday morning paper together is in jeopardy. You see, it works this way: My wife gets the front page first, I get the Business section first and the two kids split the Sunday comics. Then the sections are exchanged. Everybody is happy.

Now, in one fell swoop, The Post threatens the very tranquility and quality family time that we've come to cherish every weekend. Whose featherbrained idea was it to "combine the two comics sections into one convenient section"? Convenient for whom? Now our Sundays will be filled with bickering, battling and brawls as my wife and I will be relegated to mediating the battle for the single comics section.

-- Eric Fremont
Fairfax

The Post has made a major error by reducing to squint-size the comics we readers have come to love.

I do not exaggerate when I say that I have had to buy a large magnifying glass to figure out what in the world is going on with the many characters I know so well. And before you dismiss this as the grump of an old fogey, consider that my eyesight is 20/20.

-- Wes Pedersen
Chevy Chase

Wash Post does us another favor - Stop already!

Today's Zits was shrunk so the Post could inform us that it's shrinking the comics section as a favor to us. The following isn't online so I've typed it all (emphasis beyond the title is mine):

To Our Readers:

The Sunday comics will look a little different beginning next week. A new page design will allow us to combine the two comics sections into one convenient section with nearly all of our extensive offering of comics, puzzles and features.

To accommodate the more compact layout, "The Wizard of Id" strip and the "Hints From Heloise" column will no longer appear in the comics section, and the size of several of our larger comics as well as the Samurai Sudoku puzzle will be slightly reduced. Heloise can still be found in the Tuesday Style section, and "The Wizard of Id" appears on washingtonpost.com daily, including Sunday.

All of the other Sunday comics and features will remain, including the Mini Page, although some will be located on a different page than you're used to. We hope you'll find the combined section easier to navigate. We welcome your feedback. Write: Comics Editor, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071; email comics@washpost.com or call 202-334-4775.

So, if I'm reading this correctly, for our convenience, they've reduced the section, dropped Wizard of Id, and shrunk the rest. I don't understand why they just couldn't move the puzzles to say... the Magazine Section... and leave the comics, but that's why I'm just a blogger. Also, I don't really understand why editors think that actually offering you less in the paper you pay for will make you more inclined to buy one. Perhaps someone can explain this to me?

What a great week for comics in DC! As with Rob Ullman's situation, I'll be sending a letter to the Post, suggesting that Less is not actually More and that 1984 is well in the past. And it appears that Cul de Sac will not be moving to the Sunday section either, and presumably not appearing during the week.

Writings on comics by American U professor

I was introduced to American U professor Erik Dussere last night at the PEN/Faulkner talk. He's written a couple of articles on comics:

"Subversion in the Swamp: Pogo and the Folk in the McCarthy Era," Journal of American Culture 26 (1; March 2003): 134-141

"The queer world of the X-Men; OK, Wolverine never built a shrine to Judy Garland, but 'the strangest teens' were obviously homo superior -- emphasis on the homo," Salon (July 12, 2000)

Tomorrow's Washington Post bit on Caniff's Terry and the Pirates

See "Terry and the Pirates" by Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World Sunday, November 11, 2007; Page BW04.

Washington Post Writers Group editor Amy Lago interview

Click to"Episode 19 - The Amy Lago Show" by Brian Dunaway, on Comics Coast to Coast podcast, Thursday, 11 October 2007 to listen.