If there’s only three books of something, and you read the first two and enjoy them, you’re gonna come back and hit the third one. It’s just one of those things. I may not have anything new to say about Winging It , the third book collecting Brian Gordon’s online comic strip Fowl Language, since…
Sometimes there are things that you know you like, but you realize you’ve never really dug into. Brian Gordon’s comics strip Fowl Language is like that for me: I realized I’ve been seeing it randomly probably since it started (2013, I think), but never actually tried to read it. So I did. I grabbed this book ,…
So much goes into comedy , especially comedy in comics – there’s funny writing, and funny drawing, and the intersection of the two, plus personal taste and sometimes all of that obscured by the passage of time. Something can be done well, with lots of wordplay, well-thought-out drawings and solidly amusing premises, but still feel…
Gag-a-day cartoons are a wonderful and mysterious art, a triumph of style and viewpoint, precise phrasing and engaging drawing, with a clear point of view and a world that can be encapsulated in four panels but expands with four new panels every day for as long as the cartoonist is inspired. Well, good gag-a-day cartoons are…
…and you now know as much about the return of The Far Side as we do.
Turner Classic Movies (United States feed) has scheduled the 1931 movie Skippy for this Wednesday, February 27th, at 10:15 pm. The movie is based on Percy Crosby’s comic strip Skippy, one of the comics that Charles Schulz had in mind when making Peanuts. Joseph Nebus tells you exactly why it’s so important to comics history:…
One good joke can you pretty far. Ask anyone who’s ever headlined a sitcom or had a popular stand-up act. [1] Or a big comic strip, more to the point. The early days of newspaper strips are a treasure trove of great examples: the same artists would have dedicated space in their paper, but not…
This book looks very much like it’s going to be a parody of The Family Circus. There’s a male cartoonist, his beautiful and pearl-wearing wife, their four chibi children, and the round single-panel that encompasses all of them. But creator Benjamin Frisch apparently wasn’t interested in a re-run of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, and so The…
I can’t claim any connection to the cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, despite the name similarity. Oh, he lives in Portland, as does my brother — but I think that’s as close as it gets. The Wheelers are a vast clan, with our fingers in all of the world’s pies, and Shannon’s branch is very distant from…
This time, it definitely is the end. The previous volume finished up reprinting the fifty-year [1] run of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts in twenty-five volumes, two years in each book. (See my posts on nearly all of those books: 1957-1958 , 1959-1960 , 1961-1962 , 1963-1964 , 1965-1966 , 1967-1968, 1969-1970 , 1971-1972 ,…
This is the end; this is not the end. This volume finishes up Fantagraphics’ decade-plus reprint project covering the entirety of Charles M. Schulz’s fifty-year run on Peanuts, with the last full year of strips and the few in early 2000 that Schulz completed before his health-forced retirement and nearly simultaneous death. (Sunday strips are…
Last week we told you about two upcoming collections of Don McGregor and Thomas Yeates’ Zorro newspaper strips as part of a broader profile of Tom’s recent work. As it happens, this week will see the rerelease of Zorro – The Dailies and Sundays (The Second Year) Collector’s Edition, reprinting all the daily and Sunday strips…
