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Sunday, May 17, 2026
Review: "The Ending Writes Itself," Evelyn Clarke
The New Yorker covers: November 19, 1927
Over the years, there have been many magazines whose covers have featured the work of highly talented artists and illustrators. But probably no magazine has had more varied and memorable covers, over a longer period of time, than The New Yorker, which was founded in 1925.
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| Rea Irvin (covers untitled until February 1993) |
And now, a few words from . . . Michel de Montaigne
Let us banish the strangeness of death: let us practice it, accustom ourselves to it, never having anything so often present in our minds.
Today in the history of the American comic strip: May 17
American
cartoonists and writers may not have invented the comic strip, but some
argue that the comics, as we know them today, are an American creation.
Clearly, the United States has played an outsize role in the
development of this underappreciated art form.
5.17.1936: Mickey Finn, which Lank Leonard debuted in April, 1936, as a daily strip, adds a Sunday feature. The Sunday comic survived until 1975; the daily cartoon, until 1976.
5.17.1943: Harry J. Tutkhill revives The Bungle Family, distributing the strip himself instead of relying on a syndicate. The gag-a-day comic ran from 1918 to 1945, except for a brief hiatus in the early 1940s.
5.17.1968: Dogpatch USA, a theme park based on Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, opens in northwest Arkansas. It survived, in one form or another, until 1993.
5.17.2004: Fantagraphics Books publishes The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952, the first in a multi-volume, multi-year set that was not completed until 2016.
Most of the information listed here from one day to the next comes from two online sites -- Wikipedia, and Don Markstein's Toonopedia -- as well as 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics, edited by Maurice Horn. Note
that my focus is on American newspaper comic strips (and the occasional
foreign strip that gained popularity in the United States). Thus, comic
books and exclusively online comics are not included here.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
The New Yorker covers: July 20, 2020
Over the years, there have been many magazines whose covers have featured the work of highly talented artists and illustrators. But probably no magazine has had more varied and memorable covers, over a longer period of time, than The New Yorker, which was founded in 1925.
 |
| Richard McGuire "Dream Vacation" |
And now, a few words from . . . Anton Chekhov
Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
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