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What the Hell
Posted by Tom Crippen on June 13th, 2010 at 4:43 PMYou, Robert Crumb . . . what the hell? What the hell did you mean by that?
Tales of the Founding of the National Cartoonists Society Part III
Posted by R.C. Harvey on June 8th, 2010 at 11:59 PMTthe National Cartoonists Society could not have been started without Goldberg, and it might very well never have survived and matured without Caniff.
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Tales of the Founding of the National Cartoonists Society: Part II
Posted by R.C. Harvey on June 8th, 2010 at 12:01 AMTHEY MET ON THE FOURTH WEDNESDAY of each month, and the meetings were always dinners and mostly social. They met at the Barberry Room, Toots Shor’s, 21, Moriarity’s, “and a few other saloons” (as Goldberg put it) before finally settling in on a more-or-less regular basis at the Society of Illustrators Clubhouse on East 63rd St., where they found the bar convivial and the atmosphere homey (particularly for 40 of their number for whom the Illustrators Clubhouse was an alternative organizational home, because they were members of both groups). In the custom of such clubs, each monthly dinner featured a guest speaker, a notable in a career or profession of interest to the cartoonists.
Tales of the Founding of the National Cartoonists Society Part One of Three
Posted by R.C. Harvey on June 7th, 2010 at 12:01 AM
Part I
ON FRIDAY NIGHT, March 1, 1946, 26 cartoonists assembled at the Barberry Room on East 52nd Street in Manhattan. They met at 7 p.m. for drinks and dinner, and after dinner, they waved their inky-fingered hands and conjured into being the National Cartoonists Society. Then when the voting was over, they started a heated argument about how to define a cartoonist and retired to pour cooling emollients on the conflagration.
Beetle Bailey at the Cartoon Art Museum
Posted by Shaenon Garrity on May 26th, 2010 at 3:05 PMJust up at the Cartoon Art Museum: Sixty Years of Beetle Bailey, a massive retrospective covering everything from the earliest strips featuring Beetle as a layabout college student to…well, you know, the ones where he’s in the Army. I’d…
Strippers
Posted by Kristy Valenti on May 24th, 2010 at 5:42 PMWhat comic-strip character drove ’80s ladies wild?
Peter O’Donnell, Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin
Posted by R.C. Harvey on May 11th, 2010 at 12:01 AMSome Further Adieu
Peter O’Donnell, writer of novels and plays and comic strips, died on May 3 at the age of 90. Of all the characters he created, O’Donnell was most celebrated — even, by some (me, for instance), revered — for Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin.
O’Donnell concocted Modesty and Willie as characters in a comic strip of stylish cloak-and-dagger intrigue for a London newspaper. The strip follows the clandestine adventures of the voluptuous and superbly athletic Modesty, a retired and fabulously wealthy erstwhile leader of an international crime network who now devotes her considerable talents for lethal undercover work to helping the British secret service, which she did with the able assistance of her comrade in arms, Willie Garvin.
The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition
Posted by Chris Mautner on May 3rd, 2010 at 12:01 AMThe Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition
Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins; Del Rey; 176 pp., $24; Color, Hardcover; ISBN: 978-0345512260
Penny Arcade has grown on me over the years, I admit it. At first I found Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins’ thrice-weekly Web-comic devoted to all things videogamish to be sporadically funny at best, amateurish and insular at worst.
Time has improved my outlook. A large part of that is due to the fact that Holkins and Krahulik have stepped up their game considerably since they first began the strip 11-odd years ago. Krahulik’s art in particular has become a lot looser, wilder and more expressive. His initially stiff, awkward line has given way to a rounder, much more expressive one. In addition, Holkins’ writing and gags have become wittier, sharper and a lot less reliant on the sort of sophomoric, over- the-top violence that used to be their stock in trade.
Regardless of your opinion of the strip’s quality level, however, it’s hard not to be impressed by its success. Few comics in general — let alone Webcomics — can boast the sort of devoted readership and financial reward that Penny Arcade can.
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