While the feedback I got from my earlier question about canceling our subscription to the Globe was largely negative (here’s a sample from Universal Hub: “If you enjoy reading the paper, keep your subscription. A newspaper dropped on your front stoop is a wonderful thing to wake up to each morning. That and coffee of [...]
A few days ago I came back from a rare early-morning run and noticed an old car slowly easing its way up our street, drive-by style. The man was clearly lost. He was also delivering the Boston Globe.
That’s yet another reason to cancel our subscription to the Globe: the horrible environmental impact of the delivery [...]
I’ve been of many minds about this week’s New Yorker cover — I wrote the piece below yesterday but held back from publishing it because, well, on the face of it, it’s not exactly racist, and it is satire after all. But in some ways the furor is itself worth considering, and so I put [...]
It looks like the Globe comics editor has caved to public pressure and restored Red and Rover to the Sidekick section. What a shame.
It’s bad enough that daily comic strips like Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore run two weeks behind the political times. Reading them is like watching the Daily Show on a malfunctioning Tivo, except that the jokes are even staler than the news. But Globe columnists like Jeff Jacoby turn irrelevance into an art form. A good [...]
Dear Boston Globe:
I voted for it (like there was a choice), but Red and Rover is gone, and good riddance. Inauthentic fan letters notwithstanding, the strip is nothing more than a marketing ploy, fine-tuned to hit two notes (baby boomers and their children) in cynically calibrated harmony.
The strip is set in the 1950s, featuring tin [...]
Flipping through my copy of Billy and the Boingers Bootleg (thank you, Harvard Bookstore basement!), I ran across a plotline in which the Anxiety Closet offers up a vision of Michael Binkley as he’d be in twenty years. I checked the book’s publication date and, yep, “Billy and the Boingers” was printed in 1987. So [...]
Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics coined a new aphorism this week, and Google has yet to pick it up — despite his mentioning Google by name! C’mon Googlebot, what’s the deal? Failure is success rounded down!
As Pearls Before Swine was pointing out last week, most comic strips exist in a Nether-Nether Land where Billy never gets old and Charlie Brown never kicks the football (even if Sparky kicks the bucket). This creates a bizarre situation whenever they attempt to bring up issues like growing up, like every back-to-school season. It [...]
I don’t think any other mainstream comic strip artist goes after his peers (if you can call them that) like Sebastian Pastis. Then again, satirizing Family Circus is like shooting babies in a barrel. Still, there’s something ballsy about doing it while sharing the same page, if not the same syndicate. Earlier in the year [...]
