Sunday, July 22, 2012

Sunday morning toons: Guns don't kill people; people with guns kill people

(Update: The obituary note for Encyclopedia Brown, below, has been updated.)

Perhaps the Aurora CO shooter -- whose name, like those of previous mass killers and celebrity murderers, deserves no mention here or anywhere else -- had the media savvy to go on his killing spree in time for weekend media coverage. Certainly the “Batman” tie-in was a bit of marketing genius.

Thursday night/Friday morning, I turned on the BBC Overnight about half an hour after the shooting was over. It was fascinating to listen to The Beeb cover the story, with updates every twenty minutes or so, all the way through to the NPR handover (where format gets substituted for reporting), and you could just feel the British reporters and anchors squeezing every sphincter to keep from adding, But of course, for obvious reasons, no other first-world country has things like this happen.

Meanwhile, lucky for former Governor Romney, and his Marie-Antoinette spouse, that a mass murder in Colorado and the Penn State/Freeh Report deflected attention from his perhaps-not-strictly-illegal-but-almost-certainly-politically-poisonous personal finances.

Today's toons were ordered online, without the bother of any pesky backgound checks, from the week's pages at McClatchyDC.com, Slate, Time, About.com, and Daryl Cagle:

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Chad Lowe, R. J. Matson, Rob Rogers, Tom Toles, Matt Wuerker, Steve Sack, Nick Anderson, Daryl Cagle, Pat Bagley, Mike Keefe, Jim Morin, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Legion of Extreme Merit: Adam Zyglis.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation: John Cole.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland), and Ingrid Rice (Canada),


Ann Telnaes asks the question: What do the simple folk do?


Mark Fiore salutes Romney going for the gold.


Yow! I'm pissed at Penn State, but Taiwan's Next Media Animation wants to take it to the next level.


Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt: A really interesting-sounding collaboration by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.


Sic Transit Encyclopedia Brown. He is survived by his idiot step-brother Conservative Jones.


From the inside cover of the comic we read as kids, Tom Tomorrow brings us Republican Ju-jitsu. Sort of.


Keith Knight reviews his wackiest Comic-Con experience.


Tom the Dancing Bug's Super Fun-Pak Comix features Physics for the Ladies!


Red Meat reminds many of us of a truth from our early days.


The Comics Curmudgeon raises a disturbing question: What does it take to make Archie notice his life is in danger?


Ya tricked me! “Marry Go Round” (directed in 1943 by Seymour Kneitel, animated by Graham Place and Abner Kneitel) begins with a pin-up of Paramount babe Dorothy Lamour, the tune “Moonlight Becomes You” (Paramount had just taken over the Popeye franchise from Fleisher's Studios) and more of the seriously sexually ambivalent stuff between Popeye and his sailor sidekick Shorty. Olive Oyl was voiced (for the last time) by Margie Hines, and Shorty was voiced by the legendary Arnold Stang. Shorty's big kiss with Olive happens to the tune of “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes.”

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.


The p3 Big Oregon Toon Block:

Jack Ohman is probably being too nice to Michele Bachmann.

Matt Bors sings the song: Every contract's sacred -- every contract's good. Every contract's needed in your neighborhood.

Jesse Springer is still on leave.


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

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