Cartoons about hoboes are familiar; less so are cartoons by and for hoboes.  The Bowery News began life as the Hobo News; it was aimed at hoboes, panhandlers, Bowery bums, dishwashers, and barflies, and called itself “The Voice of Society’s Basement.”  It ran poetry, stories, cartoons, photos, and news from the hobo community.  It was […]

[Read more →]

In the days of big Sunday comics sections, many strips spread out over a whole page, and included a “topper strip”: a sort of short subject before the feature.  Some cartoonists used them to spin off a character from the main strip (particularly children and cats); some to revive an older idea; some to indulge […]

[Read more →]

December 25 is the birthday of Robert Ripley, the creator of “Believe It or Not,” and an inspirational figure to us here.  To mark the occasion, here’s a photo of him at the dinner table.  He was rather flamboyant. It’s also the birthday of Isaac Newton.  American readers, it occurs to me, may be unaware […]

[Read more →]

Giuseppe Novello (1897-1988) is one of the hidden treasures of comic art; his albums of lovingly drawn observational humor have had a long shelf life in Italy. This beautiful drawing is entitled “Blessed Intimacy: If we listened to the opera in the theater as we listen on the radio at home.” Please click to see […]

[Read more →]

Glen Morley (1912-1996) had a busy career as a composer, conductor, and arranger, particularly in Canadian broadcasting.  In the ’50s, he worked for the Rochester Philharmonic as ‘cellist and music librarian; in his younger years he also worked as a cartographer and newspaper cartoonist. Throughout his life, he produced a series of cartoons about music, […]

[Read more →]

On Sunday, May 16th, hardcore fans of the suggestive braved suspended subway service and a glorious sunny afternoon to take in some harmless smut at the Ullage Group’s “Not Dirty, Just Spicy” event at Jalopy. Doug Skinner started things off by reviewing the rhetoric of extended double-entendre. To drive the point home, he performed the […]

[Read more →]

The art of book illustration seems to have evaporated up into the ullage.  It lives on, of course, in the lively fields of children’s books and graphic novels.  But few novelists nowadays turn over a few pages to an artist to draw pictures of their stories. Which provides an excuse to post here one of […]

[Read more →]

While perusing eBay recently, I happened upon the work of Vernon Grant.  Not Vernon Grant the wonderful graphic artist (and father of Kellogg’s Snap, Crackle, and Pop) but Vernon E. Grant the wonderful cartoonist, whose work has never been reprinted to my knowledge, and which seems to be all but unavailable.  I’m not a scholar, […]

[Read more →]

About ten years ago, I discovered this Japanese cartoon while skimming through a circa-1940s scholarly journal. I don’t recall what it was doing there, or why, or that it had any particular relevance to the critical essays I was perusing, which is no doubt why it caught my attention. (Nor do I remember much about […]

[Read more →]