Dustin debuted in 2010, eighty years after Blondie. Checking today’s comics, I see the much older comic strip presents a modern take on vending machines, and vice versa for the newer strip.
The Never Vending Food Gags
Category: Cartooning
Marvelous Joltin’ Joe
June 25 will mark five years since the passing of Joe Sinnott. I was fourteen when I first read an interview with Joe. It was conducted by Mark Evanier and Tony Isabella (now preferring to be called Jenny Blake), and published in Marvelmania No. 4.
Here’s the original published format, suitable for widescreen viewing.
An brief bio is in the same issue, with Joe sharing space with bad boy Sci-Fi writer Harlan Ellison.
Drain the Swamp Thing
From DC to DC, Swamp Thing makes a special guest appearance on Paul Krugman’s Substack, nudging me ever closer to becoming a paid subscriber.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/wake-up-and-smell-the-corruption
Stepping in Man Cave Guano
Let’s keep up with Colbert, as he expounds on the dinged male egos of American men today.
Thirty-five years ago, discussion of the “masculine identity crisis” for the “post-sensitive male” resided within the NPR/New Yorker set, as popularized by Robert Bly’s Iron John. I read the book and thought it was interesting, but not particularly compelling. By that point in my life, I considered myself relatively immune to such influences, after all of the “personal searching” I’d done during my college years. Which is the proper time for such musings, after all. Speaking of the various schools of thought I exposed myself to while a student, I highly recommend the HBO Max documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
The buzz around Iron John inspired me to start working on this cartoon, with the intention of submitting it to The Comics Buyer’s Guide. I abandoned it after losing the inspiration due to interruptions for business travel.
From a Cuppala Days Ago
Following my recent Monkees-related posts there was Sunday’s Jumble That Scrambled Word Game. My offspring solved the obvious answer to the cartoon before I saw the paper. In the school tradition of “be sure to show your work,” I filled in the blanks to confirm his solution.
The Comics Curmudgeon weblog, that I believe predates this one, carries on. Unlike this safe online haven, the site is monetized, so you will see ads.
Gently nudging the strange internal illogics of comic strips is something I usually leave to the Curmudgeon. The Family Circus is an easy target, with Sunday’s installment being as unsettling as it is reassuring, in a way that’s unique to the feature.
“Here I am, Billy! Come to the light, Billy!” In Curmudgeon fashion I will point out if that isn’t Billy’s knee, his death dream was apparently a wet one.
An Old New Yorker
Yeah, I know CBS Sunday Morning “is intended for mature audiences,” as in “old.” Consider me targeted. Yesterday, they featured a New Yorker cartoonist from the publication’s first twenty years, Barbara Shermund.
Here are Shermund’s first and her final cartoon (that I could find), appearing in The New Yorker.
