Comic Strips

ComicsAlliance Presents “Kate or Die,” a series of exclusive comic strips created by one of our favorite cartoonists, Kate Leth! In this episode, Kate has some awesome tips for great spooky comics to get you into a Halloween mood. Buy them for yourself; buy them as gifts for a friend, relative, or local witch; or give them away to the best trick-or-treaters to come to your door.

For a generation of readers --- some of whom, and I'm speaking from experience here, were probably way too young to get the political satire and realize that Steve Dallas was meant to be an absolutely terrible person --- Berkeley Breathed's classic Bloom County was one of the most influential comic strips on the newspaper page. While Breathed continued to do other strips until 2009, Bloom County itself ended in 1989. Until last July, that is, when the strip made a surprising return online as Bloom County 2015, reviving the characters for more weird satire and the occasional exploding cat. And now, IDW has announced that it will be releasing printed collections of the strip starting next summer.

ComicsAlliance Presents “Kate or Die,” a series of exclusive comic strips created by one of our favorite cartoonists, Kate Leth! In this episode, Kate's getting into a spooky mood for Halloween with a collection of tales sure to send shivers down the spine of anyone working in comics. Enter ye now the ghoulish garret of the freelance cartoonist... if you dare!

On October 2nd, 1950, Charles Schulz's Peanuts debuted in nine newspapers for United Features Syndicate. Fifty years later, it concluded with just shy of eighteen thousand strips published in thousands of papers, with the final installment appearing one day after Schulz passed away. Between those two loci, Peanuts begat a billion-dollar media empire, the modern American comic strip, and a legacy of progressiveness, honesty, and inclusion that endures today. If Peanuts isn't definitively the greatest comic strip of all time, it's probably the most influential, and certainly the most successful, forever altering the dominant styles and subject matter of the funny pages.

If a reader today is at all familiar with Walt Kelly's long-running comic strip Pogo, their familiarity may simply be with the most widely circulated quote from the strip, “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” which appeared in the strip in 1970 and the same year on a poster for the first Earth Day celebration, and was repeated in 1971. But just as there is much more to this simple quote — which appeared over twenty years into the strip's run — than a simple environmental message, there is so much more to Pogo, the masterwork of one of the greatest cartoonists ever to have lived.

ComicsAlliance Presents “Kate or Die,” a series of exclusive comic strips created by one of our favorite cartoonists, Kate Leth! In this episode, Kate has some advice for people starting out in comics, on being aware of the ways that people might try to take advantage of you, and on the importance of building a support network.

The premise is always the same: Cat loves mouse. Mouse hits cat with brick. Dog takes mouse to prison. While not literally every installment of George Herriman's Krazy Kat follows this exact premise, this is the framework around which the strip was built. One might think that such a simple formula would grow tiresome quickly, but Herriman — like a master of that other uniquely American art form, jazz — could take that simple framework and improvise around it, shifting characters and landscapes into something new and beautiful every day for over thirty years.

When you look back at pop culture, you can occasionally follow the threads back to these points that change everything. They're the projects that paved the way for so much that came after, the ones that introduced their audiences to a strange new way of thinking that eventually becomes the new standard, these massive influences that vast sections of the things we love almost certainly wouldn't exist without. And for my generation, Gary Larson's The Far Side is one of those points.

ComicsAlliance Presents “Kate or Die,” a series of exclusive comic strips created by one of our favorite cartoonists, Kate Leth! In this episode, Kate dreams of another word, a better world, a magical, mythical place where we're not all on Twitter every waking minute of every day! And also where we are chairs.

ComicsAlliance Presents “Kate or Die,” a series of exclusive comic strips created by one of our favorite cartoonists, Kate Leth! In this episode, Kate turns a potentially awkward social interaction into a frankly awesome meeting of minds.