Dynamite and Buck Rogers in the 21st Century
First, the news:
Dynamite Entertainment honcho Nicky Barrucci announced today that a series based on the classic space hero Buck Rogers will be joining The Lone Ranger, Red Sonja, Zorro and Battlestar Galactica in his project lineup, with participation of Alex Ross and John Cassaday, who will be doing character designs and covers. As of this typing, no regular story and art team has been announced.
Next, the history:
Publicly credited to John Flint Dille, Anthony “Buck” Rogers was the work of science fiction author Phillip Francis Nowlan. The first novel, Armageddon 2419, was anthologized in Amazing Stories Magazine cover-dated August 1928. It was successful and sequels were commissioned; the book came to the attention of wire service and newspaper syndicate owner Dille who hired Nowlan to create a newspaper comic strip version of his novel, teaming him up with artist Dick Calkins and renaming the character Buck.
It was awesomely successful, spinning off onto all the genres available in its time and the phrase “Buck Rogers” became a colloquialism for futuristic invention. It lasted until the mid-’60s and was revived a couple of times with varying degrees of success.
Even though I don’t live in Portland, OR, where 
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 to the comics section, many of the creators involved in the protest argue that their strips are only included at the expense of other strips created by people of color. This is due to an unwritten rule in the newspaper industry prohibiting more than a certain number of "ethnic" strips in a single issue, the creators claim.
Today in 1863, the very first Sunday comic artist was born.
Our favorite role models, The Katzenjammer Kids, turned 110 years old yesterday. In case you weren’t aware, the newspapter strip is still being published each Sunday.
