You can really trust the old New Yorker cartoonists on just about any topic: The Guardian‘s Sara McCorquodale offers some advice on staying safe while dating, and quotes James Thurber on how much to drink.
Gordon Brown sure has some thin skin for such an enormous fat man: Anecdotes of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown complaining about how cartoonists portray him have been well-traveled the past few days, spurred on by an exhibition of cartoons and sketches of his early days in office. Here’s a story from the Telegraph. Mr. Prime Minister, if you’re reading, please note that I was just kidding in the headline; there’s no need to send the SAS to chat with me, as I think you’re a handsome, handsome man.
What does B.D. stand for?: This Newsweek online article about a new film chronicling a Yale/Harvard football game (or perhaps that should be the Yale/Harvard football game), reveals the inspiration for Gary Trudeau’s B.D. character, which is probably a fact long known and extremely obvious to Doonesbury fans, but I am young and stupid and ignorant of all things sports-related and maybe some of you are too so I’m going to point it out anyway.
Well, it’s about this young man, and he’s really good at tennis…: The LA Times’ “Hero Complex” blog does a light, fun Q and A with comics hop clerk Todd Matyja, who, when asked if “all Saturday morning cartoons be turned into anime,” realized the wrong answer could “vilify” him and approached gingerly, ending with “They’ll write a manga about anything! There’s one called, The Prnice of Tennis. What is that?”
Dear newspapers: Generally humorless people writing in to newspapers to complain that a particular political cartoon they ran was in poor taste or offensive or not funny or failed to support the troops or made their child cry or probably hurt the president of the United States’ feelings or whatever are pretty much a staple of newspaper letters pages. Like this one, or this cornucopia of letters. And yet whenever papers run these letters, they never re-run the accompanying cartoon, assuming everyone who reads the letters usually reads their paper and is thus already familiar with it. But what about those of us who search the Internet for stories about comics and cartoonists and have only found their paper’s site because someone wrote them a letter saying you cartoonist sucks/should be fired/should be ashamed/should be shipped to Iraq, what about us? At the very least, newspaper editors should, when posting these letters on their online editions, provide links back to the original cartoons, as that’s easy enough to accomplish online, and will better serve their more occasional readers. Like me. Basically what I’m saying is that more newspapers should cater to me specifically.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
You are correct – B.D.’s secret origin is no such thing to Doonesbury fans. Indeed, in Doonesbury the musical, his full name is given as “B. John Dowling”.