We have a special treat today from Bo Hampton. It’s his classic story, Underworked, about a cartoonist and his quest to find love, labor, and a way out of his mother’s basement. If you ever read a comic from the 1990s and wondered how that happened, this story has the answer. Next week: More Demons…
Fred (Fred Othon Artistidès) was born on this day in 1931. A French comic strip creator, Fred created his first comic in 1954. In 1960 he became art director of Hara-Kiri, and illustrated several pieces for the magazine (and its first 60 covers!) over the next few years. He is best known for his comic…
In 1907 Milton Caniff was born in Hillsboro, Ohio. Caniff was best known for the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon cartoon strips. He helped found the National Cartoonists Society and received its first Cartoonist of the Year Award in 1947. He was entered into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1988….
After 29 years of For Better or For Worse, Lynn Johnston is ending her long-running newspaper comic strip… and then she’s starting it over again. Say what? In the same week that Nicholas Gurewitch announced that he’ll be moving Perry Bible Fellowship into semi-retirement, Johnston recently announced that she’ll be doing the same — albeit…
Sure, people give Garfield a lot of flack, but after Scott Kurtz of PvP received a mysterious package from Garfield creator Jim Davis, you can bet that the famous orange cat — and his creator — have a friend for life. Over on the PvP site, Kurtz describes the gift he received from Davis in…
Time was when the whole family would gather in the living room once a week to fight over the Sunday newspaper. People would settle for their second favorite sections, but only one could start with the most popular: the Sunday funnies. Back in those days, there were no more than three strips to a page…
Did Saturday seem a little bit drab without your weekly dose of The Adventures of Simone & Ajax? A little less funny? This Thursday, we make it up to you with brand-new stories, in full color. Written and drawn by Andrew Pepoy, the new story was colored by Jason Millet. Since graduating from the…
One connection leads to another and then another, whether via the proverbial Six Degrees of Separation or by means of random-chance Free Association. Which explains how the moviemaking Coen Bros., Joel and Ethan, and Ham Fisher’s strange trailblazer of a comic strip, Joe Palooka, come to be mentioned in a single sentence. The…
The St. Petersburg Times reports that on Feb. 10, a group of notable black cartoonists will be running variations of the same joke in each of their comic strips in order to shed light on a perceived "lumping together" of cartoonists by ethnicity. With many newspapers looking to shake up their format by making changes…
A recent post on BoingBoing regarding comics based on the lives of sex workers has led to an interesting interview with Peter S. Conrad, a writer and artist whose latest project involves turning sex workers’ stories into comic strips. The interview, along with the four-page strip titled "Going Back" can be found at The Reverse…
Today in 1863, the very first Sunday comic artist was born. Yes, we should all take pause today to acknowledge Richard Felton Outcault, who drew the world’s first color comic strip, "Origin of a New Species," in The New York World‘s Sunday edition. His first regular strip was "Hogan’s Alley," but he later became known…
Today is the anniversary of a great comic debut: the funny pages revealed in 1929 the adventures of the worldly Tintin. That weird little mohawk, that smart, itsy dog, who knew the French could come up with something so, that is, tres, charming? Tintin was so popular in fact that it has been translated into…
