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Comic Art News and Reviews
Skip to commentsPublished: July 29, 2026Updated: July 29, 20262 minutes0 comments
Featuring news and reviews with Gregg Bender, Garry Trudeau, George Blevins, Pat Oliphant, Guy Richards Smit, Derf Backderf, and Matt Bors and Fred Harper.
Gregg Bender Interview
The Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal Gazette recently had Five Questions for Gregg Bender.
You spent much of your career in the newspaper industry and continue to draw for The Journal Gazette in retirement. When did illustration and cartooning first seem like a vocation, and how has your understanding of that work changed over the years?
Bender: A little background … the first newspaper I started reading was The Journal Gazette. Every morning at breakfast with Dad. He taught me how to read the stock pages and we followed his stock.
I naturally found the daily comics, and then the editorial pages and the political cartoons. Jeff MacNelly, Pat Oliphant, Dick Locher were the giants in the field. The Journal Gazette even had its own editorial cartoonist, Bob Englehart, and through the years, Dan Lynch and Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Sack…
A small archive of recent Gregg Bender cartoons at The Journal Gazette.
A Conservative Review of Doonesbury and Trudeau
Avi Green for Bleeding Fool (“opinions from the libertarian and closer to the right side of the aisle”) takes on the new Garry Trudeau biography with The Story About Doonesbury That Never Got Told.
Green notes some errors and potential errors. On Mark Slackmeyer being gay:
From the book: “Doonesbury’s Slackmeyer came out as gay in 1976. It seems almost quaint now … But this was the very first gay character in comics, and dozens of newspapers simply dropped the strip … Trudeau refused to apologize or put his character back in the closet. He accepted the economic cost of moral clarity.”
Oops, that’s incorrect. It was Lippincott, not Slackmeyer, who was the first gay male character in the strip, perhaps also in all comic strips of the times. Most mystifying, I couldn’t find any mention of Lippincott in the article. What gives on that? The glaring historical error aside, where do they get off lecturing everybody homosexuality’s literally appropriate for children?
While discussing BD’s injuries at war in Iraq Green notes Trudeau’s support of wounded veterans, but:
… it’s disturbing how the reviewer turns to claiming wars are “endless” because of the USA’s conduct, not because of the foreign autocrat tyrants and ideologies that begin them. Such propaganda only lets savages off the hook, and proves the journal’s not altruistic.
George Blevins Days
GILPIN COUNTY — On August 1 and 2 The Carousel of Happiness is hosting George Blevins Days. The community will be celebrating Blevins, an author, cartoonist, artist, librarian, friend, and all around great contributor to the community.
Blevins brought his art, wit, and wisdom to the pages of The Mountain-Ear for almost two decades with his editorial cartoons. We are bringing some of them back for you to see in the July 2026 issues of The Mountain-Ear.
Go say “hi” to George at the Carousel of Happiness on August 1 or 2. He will be there signing his books.
Jerry Falwell, Hustler, and Pat Oliphant
Roslyn Mazer for The Sante Fe New Mexican writes of Pat Oliphant‘s First Amendment amicus brief (or here).
“Do you think I could go with?” Pat Oliphant asked a few days before the Supreme Court was to hold oral argument in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, the 1988 Supreme Court case that saved cartoonists and other satirists from ruinous damage suits. I had worked with Pat and other leading cartoonists in crafting our amicus brief in support of Hustler, urging reversal of a $200,000 verdict for “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” Under Virginia common law, the aggrieved did not have to prove the offending statement was false, only that it was “outrageous” and was meant to and did cause serious emotional distress — a motive and consequence nearly all cartoonists with any self-respect would have to acknowledge.
Guy Richards Smit didn’t travel from NYC to Las Vegas this summer as a poker player for the love of the game, or to compete at the WSOP. He arrived as an artist curious about a world he never imagined he would explore.
Craig Tapscott for Poker.org profiles cartoonist/illustrator Guy Richards Smit.
… Over the next few years, Smit was involved with a student group called SOS Racism that eventually met with famous street artist Keith Haring to help the group make banners for a local anti-apartheid rally.
Smit shared with <a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/cartoonist-guy-richards-smit-on-endurance-and-the-necessity-of-self-reinvention/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>The Creative Independent in an extensive interview that Haring said one thing that inspired him on many levels: “You know guys, remember: art is for everybody.”
For Smit, that philosophy eventually evolved into a career built around creating gag cartoons: single-panel illustrations that distill observations of everyday life into visual punchlines.
For an artist whose career has been built on observing human behavior, poker proved to be one of the richest and most fascinating subjects Smit had ever encountered…
Toxic Avenger Comics #10 – A Review
Coming into Toxic Avenger Comics #10, Toxie and Yvonne had been framed for the death of President Young. The two responsible — former VP Karns and his wife, Senator Karns — were actually Smogulans who’d been hatching a coup to take over the Earth. With Mrs. Karns assuming the presidency following the deeply gross but extra satisfying death of her hubby, the world was ready to be thrown into nuclear hell. Hey, who said comics can’t be relevant AF?!
Chris Coplin at AIPT reviews Matt Bors and Fred Harper‘s Toxic Avenger Comics #10.
‘Dissidents’ revisits the repression of American editorial cartoonists in 1917
… WithDissidents, he revisits the ruthless crackdown on cartoonists who opposed the United States’ entry into World War I in 1917.
Backderf warns his reader right away: he is not a Marxist, even if some of his heroes – caricaturists from the magazine The Masses – were, and saw America’s entry into the war as the work of capitalist interests. But regardless of ideology, he is, like them, a cartoonist, and in that, he owes them a great deal. “I first discovered them as a young cartoonist when I was in college. Their work was completely forgotten then, and everything was long out of print. A professor of mine suggested I examine their cartoons. That began a lifelong interest in the cartoonists of The Masses, and their story.”
full disclosure: this posts header is lifted from John Balge’s CANAR fanzine
