Caroline Cash took over the Nancy comic strip at the beginning of this year, after a try-out run (before and after a couple of other creators) a year before. Her predecessor was Olivia Jaimes, a female creator who rejuvenated the strip in 2018 and is shrouded in mystery. Well, slightly more mystery than any other name on…
I bemoan the sorry state of single-panel cartoons a lot here – because I like them, and because they used to be a massive tide rolling across popular culture, so there were many more of the things I liked, albeit mostly before I was born – so it’s nice to be able to balance that…
I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations – and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes. So I haven’t mentioned the syndicated comic “strip” Last Kiss here before, as…
This third collection of the Macanudo daily strip – by the Argentinian cartoonist known as Liniers – is in the same style and closely follows the first two books, Welcome to Elsewhere and Optimism Is For the Brave . So, normally, I would struggle to say something different here, when the underlying work is the same…
Nancy Wins at Friendship  is the second collection of the Olivia Jaimes era of that long-running newspaper strip; it was published in 2023 but seems to mostly reprint strips from the 2019-2020 era. Jaimes took over the strip in 2018, and her first collection, just called Nancy , came out less than a year later…
It’s not often that a syndicate gets praise for how they handle the transition on a legacy comic. This is the biggest example I can think of, and one of the biggest transitions in decades. By comparison, the new Flash Gordon artist this year is more typical: breathing new life into a beloved old feature by…
It’s not quite tripping myself up, but…I sometimes specifically pick really short books to read so that I can have something to write about here the next day. (More often when I’m doing a Book-A-Day run, but at other times, too. Like right now.) But then I usually find that the really short books don’t…
Some comic strips have ongoing stories – adventure strips are rarer these days, but long continuities still exist, here and there. Some have recurring gags, done slightly differently each time – Lucy and the football, the possibly imaginary Ernesto Lacuna, a sergeant viciously beating a private. Those are things to grab onto, when you are,…
This strip isn’t exactly new to me – I’ve seen a bunch of Buni cartoons over the years, all over the place – but it’s not one I ever made an effort to read regularly. So I’m coming at it as a mostly-uninformed reader: I know it’s wordless, that the title character is happy and…
A daily strip is usually analogous to a TV show: a few are dramas, like soaps, but most are sitcoms in printed form. (And let’s remember that “sitcom” is a portmanteau of “situation” and “comedy” – it’s a comedic story set in a particular situation.) There are odder things, like The Far Side and its followers…
Books aren’t just catapulted out into the world willy-nilly, no matter what some people might think. There’s always a complex calculation on the publisher’s side, to figure out who the audience is and how best to get to those people. The books that don’t have any clear audience, or obvious way to reach them, are the…
Some comic strips are vastly more likely to be posted in specific places than others. Even decades later, Far Sides cling proudly to doors in various STEM-related departments in universities throughout the nation. Dilbert – probably mostly older ones, if we’re honest – lives on fabric-covered cube walls, most often in a position where the worker can…
