André Valente begins his week of diaries to attention, by answering the big linguistic questions…and chasing around the visual concept of what it would look like if Andre The Giant and Mandy Patinkin got together and had a couple of babies.
R.C. Harvey first encountered Playboy in 1955, two years after it started publishing. Today, in 2022, he eulogizes what the magazine used to be, and laments what it eventually became.
On staring into black glass in a room of new silence.
A drive to Princeton, a whale of a surprise, and books, books, books: today’s Cartoonist’s Diary has it all. Deadlines are in the rearview for Jennifer Hayden!
A little bit of progress counts as progress: don’t let anybody put your success on a scale! Jennifer Hayden gets it, in today’s Cartoonist’s Diary!
There’s probably no more Cartoonist’s Diary then a Diary that includes good food, deadlines, dreams, frustrating emails and good bookstores: Jennifer Hayden, starting it off correctly!
In this installment of R.C. Harvey’s long running column, he switches his focus from the comics of the past to look at the work of today: new work from Eduardo Risso, Sean Phillips, Jeff Lemire, Matthieu Blanchin, Howard Chaykin, and more. Thinks may have changed–but Bob has changed with them!
Bob has always liked his James Joyce biographies, when they’ve shown up in prose. He also, as you well know, likes his comics. So is a comic biography of Joyce, like the one by Alfonso Zapico, going to be the peanut butter to his chocolate? Let’s put it this way: the word “best” is about to get a bit of a workout.
Matthias Wivel grapples with the thorny legacy of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish artist behind the most notorious editorial cartoon of the 21st century thus far. Westergaard died last July.
Bob takes us back to the hardware store (which is near the woodshed) to uncover the story behind one of the longest running comic strips in the history books, and the only comic strip that can claim consistent Hardware Retailer serialization on its resume
Ryan Holmberg remembers Shirato Sanpei, one of the masters of politically-informed action comics, who died this past October.
Congratulations, you’re in for a lucky-number-seven capsule reviews of all sorts of comics. Recent, good superhero comics! Small-press erotic comics! Decades-old alternative comics! Extremely unhappy commercial Japanese comics! Austin English brings you everything under the sun, and you should thank him.
There’s never a bad time to talk about Bill Mauldin, but it’s especially a good time when you’ve got a whole bushel of Maulidin trivia, history and gossip to share thanks to Bob tracking down a copy of 2020’s Drawing Fire: The Editorial Cartoons of Bill Mauldin.
Damn, a doggoned disquisition on the 20th century master, in honor of a new collection of ’40s and ’50s filler frolics.
Bob takes a look at Sam C. Rawls (Scrawls), whose name never provided him a choice about what kind of profession he was best suited for, his work throughout the 80s and 90s both as a strip & editorial cartoonist, and his more recent environmental activism.
Good boy, Hank.
Scenes from the early life of Hank, as MK Reed’s diary week continues.
Garden work; a helpful pet; a fancy dress; trophies awarded before a thousand eyes in an empty room.
Today, MK and her sibling try to find some sense of normalcy in the face of 2020’s various awfulness by heading out to the farm!
A new Cartoonist’s Diary begins, and so does a new era for a dog, depicted by MK Reed as having experienced, for the first time…well, you’ll just have to read on to find out!
Bob is calling class to order, and this time, he’s looking back at Vaughn Shoemaker, the question of who invented the “Q” in John Q. Public, how the Gospels made it past the editing stage, and supplying some professional anecdotes of the way things used to be, professionally..
In today’s conclusion of Max Huffman’s Diary, he turns his pen to the recesses of his memory, delivers a classic “footprints” gag, and touches upon current affairs in a universal fashion. It’s what we in the comics business call a “perfect landing”. Get in here, buddy!
“There’s something in them trees”, Billy once said. Which Billy? And how many trees are there at the beach, anyway? Answers: they await you, here on the precipice of clicking through to Day Four of Max Huffman’s Cartoonist’s Diary!
