Category: Cartooning

Hollow Caustic Decision

Ten days ago I spoke here about Maus. It’s been revealed that one week before then, on January 10, Maus was banned from a school district in Tennessee.

Jonathan Pierce, the board member who initiated the vote to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, said during the meeting that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, but this was not the book to do it.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/27/1076180329/tennessee-school-district-ban-holocaust-graphic-novel-maus

Today happens to be Holocaust Remembrance Day. So now the question is, what Holocaust books does the McMinn County School Board allow in its schools? Being Tennessee, gotta wonder if they’re teaching “Intelligent Design” as scientific fact.

Just Call Them Political Cartoons

Last week I noted that Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the first, and so far it’s the only, graphic novel to be awarded that distinction.

The category of graphics that the Pulitzer people have recognized for exactly one hundred years is editorial cartooning. But no more. From now on, the category will be called Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. Cartooning is not illustration, and if they think this somehow dignifies the craft, it doesn’t work for me.

http://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/01/21/editorial-cartooning-legend-dead-to-pulitzers/

herblock cartoon
Herblock’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists seems to be taking the change in stride. Maybe some of their Illustrated Reporters and Commentators will have something to say about it.

DLC – Doug Loves Cuphead

If I keep posting about Cuphead this way, I’ll have to give him his own category. The “Delicious Last Course” title seemed curious to me, so I asked an expert, “Why DLC?” The answer is it’s stating exactly what the long-delayed game addendum will be — Downloadable Content.

Until the Netflix series premieres, here is the closest thing available to a Cuphead cartoon that’s independent of the gameplay. It starts with the first thing every new animator must master, a walk cycle.

Follow-up: Netflix has a preview of the cartoon series. It looks… okay… but it completely lacks the quirky charm of the work done by the original team. I’ve been told the animation shows the influence of the CalArts School of Film/Video.