#English Cartoonists

[gone2soon-rip]

BILL TIDY (1933-Died March 11th 2023,at 89). British cartoonist, writer and television personality, known chiefly for his comic strips. Tidy was appointed MBE in 2000 for "Services to Journalism". He is noted for his charitable work, particularly for the Lord's Taverners, which he has supported for over 30 years. Deeply proud of his working-class roots in Northern England, his most abiding cartoon strips, such as The Cloggies and The Fosdyke Saga, have been set in an exaggerated version of that environment.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Tidy

[thefugitivesaint]

Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910), 'The Race of Death', ''Punch'', June 3, 1903

Source

I'm very much in the "anti-car culture" camp and find cars to be one of the worst aspects of living in any city (especially in Philly in the summer). It seems early cartoonists often depicted cars as machines of death around their general introduction into our shared public spaces. (I've amassed a rather large collection of these anti-car cartoons, this one from Punch being just one example.) Here's some car facts from a recent study from the Journal of Transport Geography: 1) 1 in 34 deaths are caused by cars and automobility with 1,670,000 deaths per year 2) Cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people since their invention

[lovelydragon003]

MY GUMBALL OC WINNEFRED FUZZ!! (CHEERING SOUND EFFECT)

[gryficowa]

Boycott!

Even though I know English better than Arabic (Heck, I even know German better), I prefer to use a translator because, unfortunately, my grammar is even worse in this language (And someone wrote to me that I sound like a GPT bot… Bruh), after it's just easier for me to spot what words the translator got wrong compared to other languages, so I can correct them, but well… Unfortunately, my mind never managed to learn English well enough so that it wouldn't sound like a typical child's attempts to learn writing… My mind was simply more mathematical, logical and artistic, not linguistic…

No matter how I try, long sentences in English are too difficult for me, I can write short ones, but the longer they are, the worse it is, unfortunately the same with reading… Unfortunately, this feature of my mind is something that is bothersome even for me :/

My first language is one of the hardest languages ​​in the world, and I can't handle a language that is "Less Difficult" for a lot of people and it sucks

Now that I have your attention:

[playplaza]

Tom & Jerry - Invisible Ink - Classic Cartoon 

[angelatabatadm]

Doctor Who - Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith)

[reeteshblog28]

The Adventurous Story of King Veerbhadra and Pigeon Shwetank.

प्राचीन काल में एक समृद्ध राज्य था जिसके राजा वीरभद्र बहुत ही न्यायप्रिय और साहसी थे। एक दिन जब वे अपने महल के बगीचे में घूम रहे थे, तो ���न्हें एक घायल कबूतर दिखाई दिया। कबूतर को देखकर राजा ने उसे गोद में उठा लिया और उसकी देखभाल करने लगे। धीरे-धीरे कबूतर स्वस्थ हो गया और राजा का प्रिय मित्र बन गया। राजा ने उसका नाम श्वेतांक रखा। आगे पढ़ें

[alliterative-endlessknot]

Happy #FreeComicBookDay! And tomorrow is #NationalCartoonistsDay! So here’s our video “Marvel” about the history of comics, to celebrate!

[trungles]

Cross-posting an essay I wrote for my Patreon since the post is free and open to the public.

Hello everyone! I hope you're relaxing as best you can this holiday season. I recently went to see Miyazaki's latest Ghibli movie, The Boy and the Heron, and I had some thoughts about it. If you're into art historical allusions and gently cranky opinions, please enjoy. I've attached a downloadable PDF in the Patreon post if you'd prefer to read it that way. Apologies for the formatting of the endnotes! Patreon's text posting does not allow for superscripts, which means all my notations are in awkward parentheses. Please note that this writing contains some mild spoilers for The Boy and the Heron.

Hayao Miyazaki’s 2023 feature animated film The Boy and the Heron reads as an extended meditation on grief and legacy. The Master of a grand tower seeks a descendant to carry on his maddening duty, balancing toy blocks of magical stone upon which the entire fabric of his little pocket of reality rests. The world’s foundations are frail and fleeting, and can pass away into the cold void of space should he neglect to maintain this task. The Master’s desire to pass the torch undergirds much of the film’s narrative.

(Isle of the Dead. Arnold Böcklin. 1880. Oil on Canvas. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)

Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss Symbolist(1) painter, was born on October 16 in 1827, the same year the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church bought a plot of land in Florence from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, that had long been used for the burials of Protestants around Florence. It is colloquially known as The English Cemetery, so called because it was the resting place of many Anglophones and Protestants around Tuscany, and Böcklin frequented this cemetery—his workshop was adjacent and his infant daughter Maria was buried there. In 1880, he drew inspiration from the cemetery, a lone plot of Protestant land among a sea of Catholic graveyards, and began to paint what would be the first of six images entitled Isle of the Dead. An oil on canvas piece, it depicts a moody little island mausoleum crowned with a gently swaying grove of cypresses, a type of tree common in European cemeteries and some of which are referred to as arborvitae. A figure on a boat, presumably Charon, ferries a soul toward the island and away from the viewer.

(Photo of The English Cemetery in Florence. Samuli Lintula. 2006.)

The Isle of the Dead paintings varied slightly from version to version, with figures and names added and removed to suit the needs of the time or the commissioner. The painting was glowingly referenced and remained fairly popular throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The painting used to be inescapable in much of European popular culture. Professor Okulicz-Kozaryn, a philologist (someone with a deep interest in the ways language and cultural canons evolve)(2) observed that the painting, like many other works in its time, was itself iterative and became widely reiterated and referenced among its contemporaries. It became something like Romantic kitsch in the eyes of modern art critics, overwrought and excessively Byronic. I imagine Miyazaki might also resent a work of that level of manufactured ubiquity, as Miyazaki famously held Disney animated films in contempt (3). Miyazaki’s films are popularly aspirational to young animators and cartoonists, but gestures at imitation typically fall well short, often reducing Miyazaki’s weighty films to kitschy images of saccharine vibes and a lazy indulgence in a sort of empty magical domestic coziness. Being trapped in a realm of rote sentiment by an uncritical, unthoughtful viewership is its own Isle of Death.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

The Boy and the Heron follows a familiar narrative arc to many of Miyazaki’s other films: a child must journey through a magical and quietly menacing world in order to rescue their loved ones. This arc is an echo of Satsuki’s journey to find Mei in My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Chihiro’s journey to rescue her parents Spirited Away (2001). To better understand Miyazaki’s fixation with this particular character journey, it can be instructive to watch Lev Atamanov’s 1957 animated film, The Snow Queen (4)(5), a beautifully realized take on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 children’s story (6)(7). Mahito’s journey continues in this tradition, as the boy travels into a painted world to rescue his new stepmother from a mysterious tower.

Throughout the film, Miyazaki visually references Isle of the Dead. Transported to a surreal world, Mahito initially awakens on a little green island with a gated mausoleum crowned with cypress trees. He is accosted by hungry pelicans before being rescued by a fisherwoman named Kiriko. After a day of catching and gutting fish, Mahito wakes up under the fisherwoman’s dining table, surrounded by kokeshi—little wooden dolls—in the shapes of the old women who run Mahito’s family’s rural household. Mahito is told they must not be touched, as the kokeshi are wards set up for his protection. There is a popular urban legend associated with the kokeshi wherein they act as stand-ins for victims of infanticide, though there seems to be very little available writing to support this legend. Still, it’s a neat little trick that Miyazaki pulls, placing a stray reference to a local legend of unverifiable provenance that persists in the popular imagination, like the effect of fairy stories passed on through oral retellings, continually remolded each new iteration.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

Kiriko’s job in this strange landscape is to catch fish to nourish unborn spirits, the adorable floating warawara, before they can attempt to ascend on a journey into the world of the living. Their journey is thwarted by flocks of supernatural pelicans, who swarm the warawara and devour them. This seems to nod to the association of pelicans with death in mythologies around the world, especially in relationship to children (8). Miyazaki’s pelicans contemplate the passing of their generations as each successive generation seems to regress, their capacity to fulfill their roles steadily diminishing.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

As Mahito’s adventure continues, we find the landscapes changing away from Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead into more familiar Ghibli territories as we start to see spaces inspired by one of Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic mainstays, Naohisa Inoue and his explorations of the fantasy realms of Iblard. He might be most familiar to Ghibli enthusiasts as the background artists for the more fantastical elements of Whisper of the Heart (1995).

(Naohisa Inoue, for Iblard Jikan, 2007. Studio Ghibli.)

By the time we arrive at the climax of The Boy and the Heron, the fantasy island environment starts to resemble English takes on Italian gardens, the likes of which captivated illustrators and commercial artists of the early 20th century such as Maxfield Parrish. This appears to be a return to one of Böcklin’s later paintings, The Island of Life (1888), a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reaction to the overwhelming presence of Isle of the Dead in his life and career. The Island of Life depicts a little spot of land amid an ocean very like the one on which Isle of the Dead’s somber mausoleum is depicted, except this time the figures are lively and engaged with each other, the vegetation lush and colorful, replete with pink flowers and palm fronds.

(Island of Life. Arnold Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1888. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)

In 2022, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg acquired the sixth and final Isle of the Dead painting. In the last year of his life, Arnold Böcklin would paint this image in collaboration with his son Carlo Böcklin, himself an artist and an architect. Arnold Böcklin spent three years painting the same image three times over at the site of his infant daughter’s grave, trapped on the Isle of the Dead. By the time of his death in 1901 at age 74, Böcklin would be survived by only five of his fourteen children. That the final Isle of the Dead painting would be a collaboration between father and son seemed a little ironic considering Hayao Miyazaki’s reticence in passing on his own legacy. Like the old Master in The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki finds himself with no true successors.

The Master of the Tower's beautiful islands of painted glass fade into nothing as Mahito, his only worthy descendant, departs to live his own life, fulfilling the thesis of Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 book How Do You Live?, published three years after Carlo Böcklin’s death. In evoking Yoshino and Böcklin’s works, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron suggests that, like his character the Master, Miyazaki himself must make peace with the notion that he has no heirs to his legacy, and that those whom he wished to follow in his footsteps might be best served by finding their own paths.

(Isle of the Dead. Arnold and Carlo Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1901. The State Hermitage Museum. Saint Petersburg, Russia.)

INFORMAL ENDNOTES

1 - Symbolists are sort of tough to nail down. They were started as a literary movement to 1 distinguish themselves from the Decadents, but their manifesto was so vague that critics and academics fight about it to this day. The long and the short of it is that the Symbolists made generous use of a lot of metaphorical imagery in their work. They borrow a lot of icons from antiquity, echo the moody aesthetics from the Romantics, maintained an emphasis on figurative imagery more so than the Surrealists, and were only slightly more technically married to the trappings of traditionalist academic painters than Modernists and Impressionists. They're extremely vibes-forward.

2 - Okulicz-Kozaryn, Radosław. Predilection of Modernism for Variations. Ciulionis' Serenity among Different Developments of the Theme of Toteninsel. ACTA Academiae Artium Vilnensis 59. 2010. The article is incredibly cranky and very funny to read in parts. Contains a lot of observations I found to be helpful in placing Isle of the Dead within its context.

3 - "From my perspective, even if they are lightweight in nature, the more popular and common films still must be filled with a purity of emotion. There are few barriers to entry into these films-they will invite anyone in but the barriers to exit must be high and purifying. Films must also not be produced out of idle nervousness or boredom, or be used to recognise, emphasise, or amplify vulgarity. And in that context, I must say that I hate Disney's works. The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience." from Miyazaki's own writing in his collection of essays, Starting Point, published in 2014 from VIZ Media.

4 - You can watch the movie here in its original Russian with English closed captions here.

5 If you want to learn more about the making of Atamanoy's The Snow Queen, Animation Obsessive wrote a neat little article about it. It's a good overview, though I have to gently disagree with some of its conclusions about the irony of Miyazaki hating Disney and loving Snow Queen, which draws inspiration from Bambi. Feature film animation as we know it hadonly been around a few decades by 1957, and I find it specious, particularly as a comic artistand author, to see someone conflating an entire form with the character of its content, especially in the relative infancy of the form. But that's just one hot take. The rest of the essay is lovely.

6 - Miyazaki loves this movie. He blurbed it in a Japanese re-release of it in 2007.

7 - Julia Alekseyeva interprets Princess Mononoke as an iteration of Atamanov's The Snow Queen, arguing that San, the wolf princess, is Miyazaki's homage to Atamanoy's little robber girl character.

8 - Hart, George. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods And Goddesses. Routledge Dictionaries. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge. 2005.

[celepom]

It’s Pride 2023! Time to put up some more comic recs!

This time I’ve put together some stories about discovering one’s own queer identity, outlining a family history of queerness, and several stories where being queer isn’t the focus - queer characters are simply allowed to be.

Belle of the Ball By Mari Costa

High-school senior and notorious wallflower Hawkins finally works up the courage to remove her mascot mask and ask out her longtime crush: Regina Moreno, head cheerleader, academic overachiever, and all-around popular girl. There’s only one teensy little problem: Regina is already dating Chloe Kitagawa, athletic all-star…and middling English student. Regina sees a perfectly self-serving opportunity here, and asks the smitten Hawkins to tutor Chloe free of charge, knowing Hawkins will do anything to get closer to her. And while Regina’s plan works at first, she doesn’t realize that Hawkins and Chloe knew each other as kids, when Hawkins went by Belle and wore princess dresses to school every single day. Before long, romance does start to blossom…but not between who you might expect. With Belle of the Ball, cartoonist Mariana Costa has reinvigorated satisfying, reliable tropes into your new favorite teen romantic comedy.

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The Moth Keeper By Kay O’Neill

Anya is finally a Moth Keeper, the protector of the lunar moths that allow the Night-Lily flower to bloom once a year. Her village needs the flower to continue thriving and Anya is excited to prove her worth and show her thanks to her friends with her actions, but what happens when being a Moth Keeper isn't exactly what Anya thought it would be? The nights are cold in the desert and the lunar moths live far from the village. Anya finds herself isolated and lonely. Despite Anya's dedication, she wonders what it would be like to live in the sun. Her thoughts turn into an obsession, and when Anya takes a chance to stay up during the day to feel the sun's warmth, her village and the lunar moths are left to deal with the consequences.

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Hollow By Shannon Watters, Branden Boyer-White & Berenice Nelle

Isabel "Izzy" Crane and her family have just relocated to Sleepy Hollow, the town made famous by—and obsessed with—Washington Irving's legend of the Headless Horseman. But city slicker-skeptic Izzy has no time for superstition as she navigates life at a new address, a new school, and, with any luck, with new friends. Ghost stories aren't real, after all.... Then Izzy is pulled into the orbit of the town's teen royalty, Vicky Van Tassel (yes, that Van Tassel) and loveable varsity-level prankster Croc Byun. Vicky's weariness with her family connection to the legend turns to terror when the trio begins to be haunted by the Horseman himself, uncovering a curse set on destroying the Van Tassel line. Now, they have only until Halloween night to break it—meaning it's a totally inconvenient time for Izzy to develop a massive crush on the enigmatic Vicky. Can Izzy's practical nature help her face the unknown—or only trip her up? As the calendar runs down to the 31st, Izzy will have to use all of her wits and work with her new friends to save Vicky and uncover the mystery of the legendary Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—before it's too late. 

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Until I Meet my Husband By Ryousuke Nanasaki & Yoshi Tsukizuki

The memoir of gay activist Ryousuke Nanasaki and the first religiously recognized same-sex marriage in Japan. From school crushes to awkward dating sites to finding a community, this collection of stories recounts the author’s “firsts” as a young gay man searching for love. Dating is never ever easy, but that goes doubly so for Ryousuke, whose journey is full of unrequited loves and many speed bumps. But perseverance and time heals all wounds, even those of the heart.

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Is Love the Answer? By Uta Isaki

When it comes to love, high schooler Chika wonders if she might be an alien. She’s never fallen for or even had a crush on anyone, and she has no desire for physical intimacy. Her friends tell her that she just "hasn't met the one yet," but Chika has doubts... It's only when Chika enters college and meets peers like herself that she realizes there’s a word for what she feels inside--asexual--and she’s not the only one. After years of wondering if love was the answer, Chika realizes that the answer she long sought may not exist at all--and that that's perfectly normal.

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M Is for Monster By Talia Dutton

When Doctor Frances Ai's younger sister Maura died in a tragic accident six months ago, Frances swore she would bring her back to life. However, the creature that rises from the slab is clearly not Maura. This girl, who chooses the name "M," doesn't remember anything about Maura's life and just wants to be her own person. However, Frances expects M to pursue the same path that Maura had been on—applying to college to become a scientist—and continue the plans she and Maura shared. Hoping to trigger Maura's memories, Frances surrounds M with the trappings of Maura's past, but M wants nothing to do with Frances' attempts to change her into something she's not. In order to face the future, both Frances and M need to learn to listen and let go of Maura once and for all. Talia Dutton's debut graphic novel, M Is for Monster, takes a hard look at what it means to live up to other people's expectations—as well as our own.

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Golden Sparkle By Minta Suzumaru

Himaru Uehara’s first year of high school is off to a good start, minus one problem—he keeps having wet dreams. With only his mom and sister at home—and having skipped health class in middle school—he thinks it means there’s something wrong with him. Thankfully, a new friend has just the remedy and teaches Himaru exactly how to deal with those pesky dreams! But his solution only leads to more confusion, and the two find themselves navigating feelings they’ve never felt before.

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Thieves By Lucie Bryon

Ella can’t seem to remember a single thing from the party the night before at a mysterious stranger’s mansion, and she sure as heck doesn’t know why she’s woken up in her bed surrounded by a magpie’s nest of objects that aren’t her own. And she can’t stop thinking about her huge crush on Madeleine, who she definitely can’t tell about her sudden penchant for kleptomania… But does Maddy have secrets of her own? Can they piece together that night between them and fix the mess of their chaotic personal lives in time to form a normal, teenage relationship? That would be nice.

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic By Alison Bechdel

Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

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She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat By Sakaomi Yuzaki

Cooking is how Nomoto de-stresses, but one day, she finds herself making way more than she can eat by herself. And so, she invites her neighbor Kasuga, who also lives alone. What will come out of this impromptu dinner invitation...?

Kasuga and Nomoto promised to spend their Christmas and New Year’s together. Now, they find themselves learning more about each other’s families through the food sent by Nomoto’s mother. Cute character bento, salmon and rice, stollen, fruit sandwiches, roast beef…Nomoto and Kasuga warm up to each other over a cheerful holiday season.  

[gone2soon-rip]

PETER MADDOCKS (1928-Died November 20th 2024,at 96).English cartoonist.Maddocks contributed to many of the United Kingdom's leading daily and Sunday national papers with cartoon series such as Four D. Jones in the Daily Express in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also created children's animated series for the BBC in the 1980s, including The Family-Ness, Penny Crayon and Jimbo and the Jet-Set, and The Caribou Kitchen for ITV in the 1990s.

He continued with many more publications through cartoons and short stories. Peter Maddocks - Wikipedia

[henamyung]

Hi, guys! It's been awhile! How's going? Hope you allll have a great day tho!

Webtoon <The Maid No Longer Desires her Master> just launched on Poketcomics! YES!! I'm part of the team as storyboard artist!! You can read it on Poketcomics!

Btw, this year marks the 10TH FREAKING ANNIVEEEEERSARY of my cartoonist debut!! YAYA!!! YAYY!! Now I feel so old, gdi

I'm so glad I can show you guys English version of my work. Hope you guys like it!

Remember! Drink a bottle of water. Eat a good meal. Have a good sleep. Watch your fav shows. Also, have a great day!! SEE YAH!

[olderthannetfic]

Does anyone know why the boyfriends webtoon shows up on so many dnis? I've read a few chapters now, and aside from being fairly bland and generic, I don't see anything objectionable about it? But I also don't feel like asking the type of person who keeps a dni/ blacklists anyone who consumes x "problematic" media, that is a tar pit I don't feel like stepping in.

--

The creator is a filthy fetishizing fujo...

Or in more realistic terms, he's a trans man who drew shippy fan art of Jungkook from BTS when the latter was a teenager. The artist was... also a teenager! Shocking!

He said the n-word one time on twitter because he was a 14-year-old dumbass and not very good at English, got yelled at, and apologized.

Also, his webtoon characters might have sex lives or something.

--

There has been a massive smear campaign based mostly on idiots being jealous of this cartoonist's success. Misgendering, pedo accusations: the whole nine yards. Presumably, the DNI-havers believe some of this absolute nonsense.

[jayrockin]

I have a little question about Gillie. I don't know the language she's using so I don't understand what she's signing, but I can assume it's what her speech bubble says, and I was curious if there's a process behind deciding which words she's going to be signing in the drawing? (I'm also asking because I want to know how different artists make that choice, to help me with adding sign language to my own comics)

She is signing in ASL, both because Jovia's a cultural descendant of the USA and because the characters are depicted speaking non-diagetic modern American English (300 years would change English enough to make the comic difficult to read, otherwise), so modern ASL fits.

Disclaimer, I'm not Deaf, so I'm not the arbiter of "How to depict sign language Correctly." But the technique I use is picking a single sign from what she would be signing based on the English translation in the speech bubble. Which is rarely 1 to 1 with ASL, because ASL grammar doesn't work like English, but nouns are usually a safe bet. I bias towards "important" or emphasized words, or a sign that jives best with the posing and emotion in a scene. If I don't know the ASL sign off the top of my head I look it up on online ASL dictionaries like Handspeak, Lifeprint, and Signing Savvy. Doing full sentences or multiple signs per panel is usually not feasible, it becomes a visual mess. But this is my own preference. I've seen a variety of techniques from Deaf cartoonists, I recommend looking for their work if you're developing your own way to depict ASL in comics.

[angelatabatadm]

Doctor Who fan art

[makingqueerhistory]

Any queer webcomic/graphic novel recommendations?

Yes!

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

A ragtag crew travels to the deepest reaches of space, rebuilding beautiful, broken structures to piece the past together.

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker with Jules Scheele

Activist-academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel.

Boyfriends. Volume One: A Webtoon Unscrolled Graphic Novel by Refrainbow

Jock, Goth, Nerd, and Prep are all juniors in college. But studying is the last thing on their minds as they are mainly interested in getting a boyfriend. Or multiple boyfriends.

The Tea Dragon Society by K. O'Neill

The Tea Dragon Society is the two-time Eisner Award-winning gentle fantasy that follows the story of a blacksmith apprentice, and the people she meets as she becomes entwined in the enchanting world of tea dragons.