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| Cartoon Contest organizers Poul Nielsen and Zoran Petrovic as seen by Bruce MacKinnon |
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The dying Archduke said: "Sophie! Don't die! Stay alive for or children!"
His aide: "Is your Imperial Highness suffering very badly?".
Franz Ferdinand, dying said "It's nothing" several times.
Sophie was already dead.
His children would never inherit the crown as their mother was a commoner.
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| From left to right (top row) Thomas Nast, Dorman H. Smith, Victor Juhasz, Brad Holland, Tad, (middle row) Joseph Keppler, Frank Nankivell, Art Young, Herblock, Patrik Oliphant, (bottom row) Bill Crawford, Ann Telnaes, Gary Brookins, Martin Rowson, G. E. Ciani, J. Keppler, Alfred Owen Crozier and Matt Taibbi. |
Down through the Gilded Ages and all the boom-to-bust bubbles, one icon of American cartoonography has proven unshakable. There’s something about the symbol of big money in politics that always bends toward the pinstriped cigar-chomping fat cat and the voracious vampire squid. Of course, Mr. Moneybags has had a makeover and update or two over the years, but our “malefactors of great wealth” haven’t been able to shake the avatar penned by us ink-stained wretches for a couple centuries now.
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| Minister of Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney |
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| Minister of Justice Peter Mackay claims women prefer motherhood to the bench. |
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| Mick Jagger by artist Ricardo Martínez La Luna de Metrópoli magazine, the weekly supplement of Spanish newspaper El Mundo |
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| Mehmet Düzenli |
Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the brilliant Richard Thompson. I recently had the pleasure of working with five other fans to compile a book on the Art of Richard Thompson, available from Andrews McMeel on Amazon this fall:
As we get closer to the release date, I will tell you about the book and its beautiful full color paintings, complex illustrations and comic strips. But today I'd like to focus on the preliminary sketches and doodles that we found littering the floor of Richard's studio like used Kleenex.
On Monday night, after he and I did a public Q&A for nearly 500 people at The Washington Post building, Stephan Pastis— acclaimed author of “Pearls Before Swine” and bestselling author of the “Timmy Failure” books — made a few self-deprecating jokes about his own drawing ability. Because Pastis and “Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson have confirmed this exclusive report (below), I can now say: Pastis has just executed a gift at “drawing” that few cartoonists can top:
1. Amazingly, he drew the long-retired, once-reclusive Watterson … out of retirement — and got him to create fresh art for this week’s “Pearls”; and
2. Pastis managed to draw out his Watterson-week storyline brilliantly, layering humor upon meta-humor in a hilarious house-of-mirrors reflection on the comic-strip industry past and present. Has anyone in recent memory drawn such feats as that? It is special to have Watterson back into the comic-page spotlight, even if only for a few wonderful days.
–M.C.
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| Bruce MacKinnon |
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| Bruce MacKinnon, The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax |
