It’s been interesting, over the past few months, to watch the evolution of Rhymes With Orange as it went from the singular brainchild of Hilary Price to a collaboration between her and Rina Piccolo, who closed down Tina’s Groove to make the changeover.The diagram of these two established cartoonists would have a circle for “Ironic […]

Another “Where to start?” day, so we’ll start with Between Friends, where it looks like the story arc of Maeve and Frank is heating up a bit.I have infinite faith in Maeve’s ability to screw up any relationship, mind you, so the suspense is whether she blunders into something awful and only gets out at […]

There are all sorts of Harvey Weinstein cartoons floating around at the moment, but a lot of them miss the point.Or, at least, they miss my point. Oddly enough, my point was served up on a silver platter by happenstance in the form of today’s Vintage Juliet Jones, which originally ran July 21, 1960, when […]

 Candorville not only strikes a personal note, but prompts some consumer information.I’d like to see some kind of action against deceptive use of “pre-qualified,” but action against deceptive marketing went out of favor in the Reagan years. Caveat emptor, baby!Today, as Lemont learns, “pre-qualified” means you have a mailing address.When I got my first credit […]

I’ve known Brian Fies since the turn of the century, before he began unveiling pages of “Mom’s Cancer”at rec.arts.comics.strips for feedback, when he was simply one more poster there, though an amusing and insightful one.As his project evolved from webcomic to book, the group got a good look at how Brian views the intersection of […]

At Between Friends, while Maeve ponders quitting her job to gallivant off with her wealthy boyfriend, her assistant Helen contemplates what would happen to her then, and wonders if it’s time to retire.I’m sympathetic. Having “retired” at the start of my career in order to try being a novelist, I’m now in a position where […]

Start with a curiosity before getting into heavier topics: Francis, in which Brother Leo is a fool in the classic, Christian sense.I liked the Latin mass, both because liturgy should inspire a little awe, and because of its universality. I went to mass in Switzerland in 1965, as the mass was being divided into parts […]

Best way to start this off is with a Jimmy Margulies cartoon that admittedly is not his most recent, but which does seem to capture the Trump administration’s policy, to the extent that they have an actual policy at all.It’s an oversimplification: Trump is actually rolling back policies that go at least to Richard Nixon, […]

News update: Friend-of-the-Blog Brian Fies has lost his home in the California wildfires, as did Jeannie Schulz, though the Peanuts museum is reportedly okay. Everyone is safe, but a lot of memories lost. Pearls Before Swine cartoonist Stephan Pastis reported last night that he does not know the fate of his home in Santa Rosa, […]

Having done a lot of talk in the past couple of days, I’m correcting the average with a look back a half century at Oct 9, 1967.There were several strips I had forgotten, but also several I’d never seen before.Here’s a heaping helping of 10/09/67, with minimal commentary: (A little commentary here — We didn’t know […]