Tagged: strip

Alaska Names Cartoon Laureate

Alaska Names Cartoon Laureate

  • News
  • September 2, 2008

Suddenly, there’s a lot of news coming out of Alaska.  In addition to the state’s governor being nominated as the Republican candidate for Vice President, cartoonist Chad Carpenter was named Alaska’s Cartoon Laureate last week. State representative Wes Keller began campaigning for the designation back in February, according to the Daily Cartoonist. 

Carpenter has been drawing Tundra for a dozen years now and as a thirty year resident of Alaska, knows something about the environment. He was encouraged to get into comic strips by Dik Browne and Mike Peters and has managed to grow his strip into a mini-empire with not only the strip but four strip collections, t-shirt designs, note cards, mouse pads, bumper stickers, and an interactive CD-ROM.

Keller said at the time, “Chad is one of my most famous constituents. I love his humor and success, and I was happy to ask my fellow legislators to support and co-sponsor this citation recognizing and honoring the work and goodwill he has accomplished for Alaska during his successful run of Tundra. His ability to export Alaska grown is a true example of what you can do when you put your mind to it.”

On May 24, Carpenter was given the Reuben Award for Best Newspaper Panel, crediting Carpenter’s success as a self-syndicated cartoonist with over 200 newspapers carrying Tundra.

‘For Better or For Worse’ Calls it a Wrap

‘For Better or For Worse’ Calls it a Wrap

  • News
  • August 31, 2008

Just shy of its 29th anniversary, today Lynn Johnston completes her run on For Better or For Worse.  The comic strip, though, isn’t going away nor is it exactly going into reruns.

 

Instead, Johnston is going back to the beginning, when the strip debuted on September 9, 1979 and is cleaning up her art and dialogue.

She’s been reaching an end point for some time now and has repeatedly revised how she intends to carry on once the storyline ends.  One thing has remained certain, she wanted to bring the characters full circle so John and Elly are now the grandparents and Michael’s children are about the same age as he was when the strip first arrived.

"All of September will be brand-new material," Johnston explained to The Washington Post. "In October, it will be [a ratio of] 50-50. The color Sunday comics will be all-new material. . . . I think it will be 50-50 for the first year, at least."

Johnston continues to work in her Toronto studio although does so after recently separating from her husband, an act she says now frees her. "I really wanted to be happy as a couple and make everything right, but things became more stressful. . . . It made me look again at my career. I thought I would now be a retired woman with my Tilley hat and sitting on a cruise ship and going to the Galapagos," Johnston said.

 

(more…)

The Barn Comes to Newspapers

The Barn Comes to Newspapers

  • News
  • August 28, 2008

Canadian cartoonist Ralph Hagen will craft a new comic strip, The Barn, debuting from Creators Syndicate on October 27. The strip will concentrate on the interaction between farm animals and local humans.

Hagen, a self-taught artist, has been professionally illustrating for 31 years and has been published in a variety of outlets from The Saturday Evening Post to Reader’s Digest. He’s also done commercial illustration for numerous clients including Kraft Foods.
 

Review: ‘The Fart Party’ by Julia Wertz

Review: ‘The Fart Party’ by Julia Wertz

The Fart Party
By Julia Wertz
Atomic Book Company, May 2008, $13.95

Julia Wertz’s comics would be terribly juvenile if they weren’t wonderfully juvenile – little snippets of life from a young woman in San Francisco, obsessed with beer, cheese, bicycles and comics. (Not to mention the occasional outburst of cartoony violence.)

Wertz has been posting her autobiographical comics at www.fartparty.org for nearly three years now, with occasional published-on-actual-paper minicomics as well, but this is the first collection that sits comfortably on a shelf. It seems to collect roughly the first year of the online strips, when Wertz was living in San Francisco with her boyfriend, Oliver, though the book itself doesn’t say that, or have dates on any of the strips. (Wertz’s life has changed a bit since the time of these strips; she’s currently ensconced in Darkest Brooklyn.) The strips here do form something of an arc, and have a natural ending, which is rare for any collection of regularly published comics, from the web or anywhere else.

Wertz’s style is simple and cartoony, but springs out full-formed from the beginning of the book with all its rubber-armed, pointy-eyed, casually-violent energy. Wertz does include a couple of strips she created earlier, in a more conventionally “realistic” style. But she buries those strips in the middle of the book, and they’re definitely less distinctive than her current style. I’m sure the fine-art brigade will hate her work – as will the good-taste brigade, which is similar but not identical to the first brigade – but she’s a real cartoonist, and that’s something to be celebrated. There’s still room for improvement in her style; her faces are only intermittently expressive at this point, and the figures’ body language tends to huge, stagy gestures even when those aren’t appropriate.

(more…)

Man Finds Will Eisner Printing Plates

Man Finds Will Eisner Printing Plates

  • News
  • August 5, 2008

Here’s a story that might be more suited to PBS’s Antiques Roadshow than a comics audience, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

A man in Woodbury Heights, New Jersey picked up some old printing plates and then, years later, he checked them out and found some were of little-known Will Eisner cartoons.

This article in the South Jersey Courier-Journal retells the story.

In his studio, Getsinger stood by thin, metal comic strip printing plates stacked neatly in hundreds of rows. The collection’s value is unknown, but Getsinger believes the entire collection is worth more than $1 million with printing and publishing possibilities.

Getsinger has two almost-complete collections of Will Eisner’s first published comic strips, "Harry Karry" and "Uncle Otto."

"I found these "Harry Karry’ plates by a "Willis B. Rensie,’ which is Eisner spelled backward," Getsinger said. "I did some research and also learned that these "Life in the Roar’ comics by "Kane’ were early comics of "Batman’ creator Bob Kane.

"It’s like discovering the Holy Grail."

Getsinger has more than 80 plates of Kane and 85 plates of comic book legend and "The Spirit" creator Eisner, who died in 2005.

Review: ‘Shmobots’ by Adam Rifkin and Les Toil

Shmobots is a pretty stupid book on its face. And it’s pretty stupid inside too.

Government negligence leads to a city full of worthless robots (termed [[[Shmobots]]]), and three of the laziest ones hang out with a guy and do pretty much nothing with their lives.

The humore here — from writer Adam Rifkin — is all pretty obvious, heavy on robot cliches and slacker jokes we’ve heard before. Yet the book has an undeniable charm, no doubt because its creators acknowledge those faults and even celebrate them.

Sure, the lead robot character is a carbon copy of Bender from Futurama, but he’s used (at least this is my guess) to make fun of the stupid humor genre even while revelling in it.

There is a more involved plot than I let on: the robots and human friend are constantly looking for money, while unknowingly they’re being stalked by the Shmobot Killer. The plot advances at a marijuana-soaked pace.

(more…)

Nudist Camp: The Comic

Nudist Camp: The Comic

  • News
  • July 10, 2008

The National Post’s writer and cartoonist team of Ben Kaplan and Steve Murray recently chronicled their foray into a nudist colony in Ontario, Canada, and the resulting story and comic strip, well… they pretty much speak for themselves. From naked lawn care to threesomes in a hot tub, both features provide a funny, fish-out-of-water look at the inner workings of a popular no-clothes destination.

"Who’s going to believe I go to a nudist camp to get away from my sexual urges, but it’s true," English, 62, says in his trailer, where a pair of jockeys rests on a tub of gum drops. English now wears tan shorts and white Crocs and quotes Second Timothy, Chapter III, Verse six in a sermon that invokes rape fantasies, C.S. Lewis and a diatribe against Four Seasons showing porn.

(via journalista)

Review: ‘PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On’ by Scott Kurtz

PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On
By Scott Kurtz
Image, June 2008, $14.99

Image is a comic-book publisher, and sees everything through that lens. So, for them, this is a book “collecting issues 25-31 of the hit comic strip series,” as the cover proclaims. For most of us, though, PvP (http://www.pvponline.com/) is a daily comic strip on the web, so what’s important is that [[[Treks On]]] collects strips from June 12, 2005 through April 9, 2006. (Possibly not all of them, since several seem to be added at the beginning and others are missing at the end – and there were some duplicates in the middle, too – but most of them, at least.)

Image might think that referring to comics – which cost money – instead of to a free webcomic might increase the perceived value of their book, but are there really people – even in the inbred, hothouse environment of the comics shop – who would be a) interested in a daily comic strip about computer gaming and b) unfamiliar with webcomics?

My complaints about Image’s publishing strategy aside, this is a handsome package, with the strips shown at a nice large size, two to a page. We’re running about two years behind the current strip, so Brent isn’t even engaged to Jade yet – though he comes darn close in one storyline here. The other character relationships are close to where they are now: Francis and Marcy are friendly but not quite dating, and Robbie & Jase win the lottery in these strips.

(more…)

Rutu Modan’s New Comic Strip Debuts

The people over at The New York Times Magazine clearly have a great sense of the contemporary comic book scene. Earlier this year they picked up a new series by Jason (of I Killed Adolf Hitler fame), and now they’re debuting a new series by Rutu Modan, whose graphic novel Exit Wounds was one of the best books of 2007.

The ongoing strip, The Murder of the Terminal Patient, is kicked off with a selection of Modan’s comics, which you can view right here. One of the pages is at right, from Exit Wounds. The first chapter of Terminal Patient is also available to download as a pdf.

As with much of Modan’s work, it’s set in Israel. So far, it features Dima, who emigrated from Russia and works as a nurse in a hospital. 

(via The Beat)

Happy Birthday: Frank Bolle

Happy Birthday: Frank Bolle

  • News
  • June 23, 2008

Born in 1924 in New York City, Frank Bolle grew up doodling. He went to the High School of Music and Art and then served in the Air Force from 1943 to 1946.

After the war Bolle attended Pratt Institute and began looking for work—his first job in comics was in 1948 and he has been working in the industry ever since. He illustrated westerns like Black Phantom, Tim Holt, and Redmask for Magazine Enterprises; worked on Sherlock Holmes, The Lone Ranger, and other adventure stories for Western Publishing; drew several strips and covers for Boys’ Life; and did Doctor Solar, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and others for Gold Key Comics.

In 1982 Bolle joined Stan Drake on The Heart of Juliet Jones comic strip, which he drew for seventeen years—Bolle also drew the Winnie Winkle comic for twenty. He is still drawing Apartment 3-G, which he took over in 1999.

Bolle has won three Graumbacher Gold Medallion Awards for his oils and watercolors. In 2003 he was awarded the Inkpot Award for lifetime achievement.

 

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks