Sunday, January 23, 2011

Sunday morning toons: Civility -- it's the natural thing to do!

(Update: Inexplicably wrong animation link below is fixed.)

Let's see: Glocks are selling like Pez in Tucson, although Comcast's fingerprints are nowhere near the firing of Keith Olbermann (so far). A couple hundred people with great healthcare for life just voted to make sure that doesn't happen to you. And President Obama issued a stirring call for civility. Good luck with that one, Mr. Obama.

Today's selections have been hand-selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, Mario Piperni, About.com, and Daryl Cagle:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Pat Bagley, Chan Lowe,
Jeff Koterba, Jeff Parker, David Fitzsimmons, Clay Jones, Mike Keefe, Tom Toles, Steve Kelly, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Legion of Honor: John Cole.

p3 Whither Olbermann Award: John Cole.

p3 World Toon Review: Ingrid Rice (Canada), Pavel Constantin (Romania), Cameron Cardow (Canada), and Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland).


Ann Telnaes reminds us: Watch them when they smile.


Mark Fiore asks, what could be worse than forcing health care providers to spend 80% of the money they get from premiums on . . . providing health care? Answer: This, apparently.


This Modern World examines isolated incidents (except when they aren't).


Keith Knight asks, Remember Haiti?


When tragedy strikes, says Tom the Dancing Bug, pundits leap into action!


This week, it's a Barry Blitt twofer:

First, here's his illustration for this week's Frank Rich NYTimes column on a certain movie's connection to the zeitgeist. '

And second, here's his wry cover for last week's New Yorker, about a certain Broadway musical's ongoing troubles.


What, me catch on? The October 1971 "Back to School" issue of National Lampoon featured a MAD Magazine parody, including a piece titled "You Know You've Really Outgrown MAD When..." Fond of MAD as I was, it seemed sort of right at the time. Now, courtesy of the Blue Gal, will I have to consider the possibility that MAD's best days may not be entirely behind it?


We used to call it "shameless borrowing;" now we call it "intertextuality:" From this week's Pearls Before Swine strip.


It was the year of the Mohammed cartoon: This week, Comic Riffs announced the winners of the 2011 Riffy Awards.


And speaking of MAD Magazine: One reason it switched from comic to magazine format early in its life was to escape the Comics Code Authority, a quintessentially 1950s self-regulatory measure adopted by the comics industry to head off even worse censorship in the age of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and public scold Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. Since the early 1970s, the CCA's rules have been honored as much in the breach as in the observance, but now -- at long last -- the CCA is all but dead. When even Archie comics no longer feels the need to bow to its archaic list of taboos, that's the death knell.


Red Meat reminds its readers: Ask your doctor.


The Comic Curmudgeon salutes Mary Worth's salute to post-war avant-garde music. At least I think that's what's going on. Anyway, it's dollars to donuts you won't find that reference anywhere else in this week's funnies.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman salutes America's health care system, by the numbers.


It's the natural thing to do! To make their audience happy, Popeye, Bluto, and their chief enabler Olive resolve to "cut out the rough stuff once in a while and act more refined." The implications for American political discourse are obvious. "It's the Natural Thing to Do," directed by Dave Fleischer, voiced by Jack Mercer, Margie Hines, and Pinto Colvig, animated by Tom Johnson and Lod Rossner, and released in 1939 in glorious monochrome 2-D.



(Note to Facebook friends: If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post, below, to see the video.)


p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer says, "The Oregonian in me hopes that the two parties can set aside their traditional partisan bickering. But the cartoonist in me..."




Test your toon-captioning chops at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

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