Skip to commentsPublished: August 18, 2026Updated: August 18, 20261 minute1 comment
A Roger Langridge interview, a Bill Mauldin/Willie & Joe exhibit, and James Bond and Bolling, Ruben Bolling.
Roger Langridge, Cartoonist Extraordinaire
A favorite cartoonist of The Daily CartoonistRoger Langridge is interviewed at DAF Novelties by Danny Ferbert.
Your run on Popeye is one of my favorite comic books. Are you a fan of the Popeye cartoons?
Roger: I like the Fleischer cartoons well enough, but my way into Popeye was really via the original newspaper strips by E.C. Segar, which I discovered as a kid through various reprints (especially The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics) and adored. If Barks is my favourite comic book cartoonist, Segar is my favourite strip cartoonist. By the time I was asked to work on the comic book, I’d read all of the Segar stuff thanks to Fantagraphics’ reprint projects (them again!), so that was a dream come true for me.
McLusky, John McLusky and Bond, James Bond
Ruben Bolling at Boing Boing holds forth on the idea that the James Bond comic strip was influential in getting Sean Connery his most famous acting role.
When the comic strip was first proposed, Ian Fleming commissioned an artist to draw James Bond as he would like to see him depicted: dashing and sophisticated. That drawing can be seen on this Wikipedia page and below.
But comic strip artist John McLusky disregarded the wishes of the author who created the character, wanting Bond to look more rugged and masculine.
Mauldin at the Mouth of The Mississippi
Dave Walker for The Times-Picayune (or here) reviews the Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War exhibit that recently opened at New Orleans’ National WWII Museum.
The exhibit originated at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The challenge for the team at the WWII Museum was to find ways to expand the exhibit’s presentation from mostly two-dimensional cartoons and a few objects (including Mauldin’s Purple Heart) to fill the expansive Alario Special Exhibition Hall.
Using macro-artifacts like the doomed Jeep also added emphasis on Mauldin’s wartime work, which would be more of a focus for museum visitors than the sequences on his early life and later newspaper successes (for which he won a second Pulitzer).
More about Bill Mauldin, Willy & Joe, and the exhibit from Melissa Davenport at Hoodline.
A World War II-era jeep with a disabled axle now sits inside the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, part of a sprawling new exhibit built around the ink-and-paper work of Bill Mauldin, the Army cartoonist whose grimy, weary infantrymen Willie and Joe became the visual shorthand for the American GI experience. The exhibit, titled Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War, is on view through April 18, 2027, and pairs Mauldin’s original drawings with real wartime artifacts, including the Purple Heart he earned after taking shrapnel from a German mortar.
feature image of Muppets Sweetums and Kermit by Roger Langridge
