My alma mater is marking its 60th year, as is its student newspaper. Long Beach State, or more properly California State University Long Beach, was born in 1949 and was saddled with the school nickname of the Forty-Niners (the lame football mascot was a big-chinned character holding a gold-mining pan… yeah, real scary to [...]

A new global forum for ideas as brought forth by editorial cartoonists and video journalists has made its debut, and I am delighted to be a part of it.
The Video Journalism Movement, at www.vjmovement.com, comes out of The Netherlands and like many good ideas, began in a bar.
Thomas Loudon was a Dutch video journalist covering [...]

The past week has seen one big win for editorial cartooning jobs, and one big loss.
The big win was Drew Litton, who is the rarest of breeds, a sports editorial cartoonist. His job abruptly came to a halt when his newspaper, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, shut down, throwing him (and his coworker Ed Stein) out [...]

On Saturday night at its annual banquet, the Los Angeles-based Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS) honored an ailing legend in the comic book industry, Gene Colan, and did a nifty handing of the award to him 3,000 miles away.

While the layoffs and buyouts at daily newspapers have slowed lately (or at least until all the 3rd Quarter revenues are tallied), editorial cartooning still took a lot of hard hits in the past 18 months.

Alas, when one is an editorial cartoonist, one is compelled to keep drawing, whether the body is ready to do so or not.
In light of Iran’s new and highly provocative long-range missile tests, right after Obama revealed to the world Iran’s previously undisclosed facility for enriching nuclear fuel for weapons, I came up with an [...]

A cartoonist requires, at minimum, the following working tools: a mind, a hand and a couple of eyes. Right now I’m down one of these.
No, it isn’t the mind, although I know there are many out there who are convinced I long ago lost mine, based on political disagreements. The drawing hand is working OK, [...]

The political volume has gotten way too loud lately.
The “Town Hall” forums on healthcare, with orchestrated protests arranged by talk show hosts and bloggers, turned into screaming matches instead of rational debates on a subject affecting every American. It wasn’t so much that people disagreed with Obama’s proposals, but the point of the turnouts seemed [...]

Not many people remember Virginia Davis. Her main career work began 86 years ago. But she was the first Disney star, and it was she — not Mickey Mouse — who launched the Walt Disney empire.

Walt Disney was in Kansas City, not Hollywood, and his Laugh-O-gram Films was turning out silent animated cartoon shorts, which [...]

For a change, some good news in the world of editorial cartooning: a long-vacant position is being filled. And not just any position, but the Chicago Tribune, one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers.
The position has been vacant for nearly a decade, ever since Jeff MacNelly, winner of three Pulitzer prizes, died of cancer in [...]