Awards: Chelsea Saunders, whose work is often published at The Nib, is the winner of the 2019 Locher Award for emerging editorial cartoonists. Hit that link for some good reading, because the runners-up have a lot of talent as well.
Annals of Bad Taste: Dilbert creator Scott Adams has some rather, er, interesting projects going on outside of comics, and his enthusiastic promotion of one of them got him some bad press this week. His app WhenHub offers witnesses to major news events a way to get paid for interviews. It’s sort of Uber for journalists, except that ethical journalists do not pay for interviews. What got folks in a lather, though, was not the existence of this app so much as the way Adams promoted it: By reaching out to witnesses to the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting on Twitter. The Daily Cartoonist rounds up the local news reporting and the nationwide reactions, which Adams says are political:
“All of the pushback I’m getting is fueled by an intense hatred of Trump, or therefore for anyone who has ever said anything good about Trump. It also is about gun control, and it’s about people feeling helpless to be able to do something about it.”
Recommended Reading: Critic Paul Gravett picks his top 20 September releases, and it looks like it’s going to be a helluva month, with new graphic novels from Chris Ware, Eleanor Davis, Taiyo Matsumoto, and more!
Sistas in Space: Rosarium Publishing publisher Bill Campbell talks about his first foray into writing comics: Baaad Muthaz, a space opera about a James Brown cover band who double as space pirates.
Ten Years After: I talked to Michael Uslan and Dan Parent about their upcoming comic series Archie: The Married Life 10th Anniversary, in which the Riverdale gang hits their 30s, and about how it relates to all the other Archie series.
Hometown Hero: The Trib profiles Joe Wos, who in is launching a new comic series for children, The Inventsons, in collaboration with the people who run the real-life “immersive work environment. Inventionland. The comic is designed to encourage young people to explore inventing. One of the founders of the Pittsburgh Toonseum, Wos is a veteran cartoonist, but creating a serial comic was a new experience for him; previously he had worked in other formats, including comic strips, animation, and something he invented called MazeToons, basically a puzzle/comic combo.
Hometown Hero II: My own hometown paper, the South Bend Tribune, profiles math-teacher-turned-comics-creator Jim McClain, who has turned mathematical concepts into a sort of Justice League of Algebra, a.k.a. The Solution Squad.
War Stories: Good news for fans of UK war comics and of Corto Maltese creator Hugo Pratt: The British publisher Rebellion is bringing back all of Pratt’s UK comics in collected editions, and they are starting with Battle Stations: War Picture Library.