Instead of a text piece about cartooning or cartoonists, the editors have in recent “cartoon issues,” including this one, published an article about a comedian, thinking, apparently, that since cartoons provoke laughter, anything that provokes laughter is suitable fodder for the “cartoon issue.”
Time for all good men to come to the rescue of a lazy private
We’re back, me and my rabbit, none the worse for the wear …
R.C. Harvey concludes his two-part essay on the end of Brenda Starr by filling in some details about the strips’ creator and her successors.
The first of a two-part elegy by R.C. Harvey on the passing of the the Brenda Starr comic strip.
For as long as anyone can remember, the Newspaper Enterprise Association has served up a special three-week holiday comic strip to subscribers to the NEA package. In the December 1981 issue of Cartoonist PROfiles, Ernest L. “East” Lynn was among several NEA officials who were surveyed for comment on the Yuletide custom. Lynn was dean of comic art at NEA from 1924 to 1964, and he said the Christmas Strip had started before his time. And that would make this year’s offering at least the 86th return engagement. But Lynn was probably wrong.
The traditional definition of comics is the one conjured up by Coulton Waugh in his book Comics (1947). He says comics consist of three elements: (1) sequence of pictures that tell a story or joke, (2) words incorporated into the picture usually in the form of speech balloons, and (3) continuing characters.
The last item snatches at sophistry. It’s there under false pretenses. Its function is purely rhetorical — to eliminate anything that came along before the Yellow Kid, the most conspicuous of the combatants in New York’s newspaper circulation battles of the 1890s. The Yellow Kid was seen as the first comic strip character mostly because he was a highly visible and successful commercial enterprise — the commercial aspect establishing the value to newspapers of comic strips
Non Sequitur Does a Follow-up
Barney & Clyde by Several Persons
English