newspaper comics

Ever since Bloom County became a sensation in the early '80s, Berkeley Breathed has had an incredibly varied career. He followed Bloom County's initial success with two more popular comic strips, Outland and Opus; he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning; he wrote and illustrated best-selling children's books; he adapted his own stories into a pair of animated TV specials, and he provided art for various environmental and animal-wellfare charities. In recent years he's shifted his primary focus to film (production art and original projects), while also overseeing IDW's comprehensive collected editions of his strips. He recently teamed with IDW again for Berkeleyworks, a retrospective volume collecting a number of his paintings, sketches, and illustrations – and last month, he made a rare convention appearance, playing to a packed room at San Diego Comic-Con. ComicsAlliance spoke with Breathed about his career in cartooning, his work in other media, and his upcoming projects.

The United States Postal Service recently announced its stamps of 2010, including one particular set that I think will be of interest to you all: The Sunday Funnies Collection! Based on popular newspaper comic strips, the series will include stamps involving Archie, Garfield, Dennis the Menace, the cast of "Beetle Bailey," and my personal favorites, Calvin and Hobbes...

With space for comic strips shrinking in newspapers and a slew of webcomics winning huge audiences, the funny pages on paper have been feeling stale for a while. After all, why bother to go through the difficult process of getting accepted by a syndicate -- one that rejected numerous creators that went on to webcomics megasuccess, like Tatsuya Ishida of "Sinfest" -- when you could instan

As more newspapers fail and money grows tight, the current "Doonesbury" storyline addresses the smaller and smaller sizes of comic strips in print. As Gary Trudeau points out, nobody wants to make comics smaller -- but it's difficult to avoid as newspapers fight tooth and nail to stay afloat...

Normally, we'd leave this sort of thing to the great Josh Fruhlinger of The Comics Curmudgeon, but DC's upcoming "Wednesday Comics" prompted us to take a look at the newspaper comics page and have a few laughs. Instead, we were surprised to find strips so relentlessly soul-crushing that even Chris Ware would be jealous...