I enjoyed today’s Argyle Sweater, Scott Hilburn’s daily panel cartoon, and I just had to share.

Don’t Cry for Me, I’m Already Dead is a tearjerker of a comic about brothers who communicate only through Simpsons quotes. The artist is Rebecca Sugar whose “dirty” renditions of cartoon characters were featured on the Brew last year. Her mad drawing skills continue to knock my socks off.

Also don’t miss her droll student film Johnny Noodleneck:

…and this fine bit of dance animation:

A major retrospective of work by underground cartoonist Kim Deitch opens at New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art on September 9th. There will be an opening reception on Friday September 12th from 6 – 9 pm. The exhibit will display original comics pages and other work covering the artist’s entire career to date, beginning with full-page comic strips drawn for the East Village Other in the sixties up to recent graphic novels including The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Alias the Cat, Shadowland, and Deitch’s Pictorama. The Museum will also host a series of talks and events related to the exhibit.

MoCCA is located at 594 Broadway, Suite 401, between Houston and Prince. It is open to the public Monday through Saturday from 12 – 5 pm, Sundays 12 – 3 pm. The opening reception is free and open to the public. For more information visit the MoCCA website. The Deitch exhibit will run through December 5th.

Over the past year I’ve collaborated with Leslie Cabarga on several Dark Horse Books compiling the best stories of the classic Harvey Comics characters (Casper, Richie Rich and Hot Stuff). None has given me greater pleasure than the forthcoming collection of Baby Huey, which goes on sale in late September. The stories are all drawn by Dave Tendlar (see splash page below) and Marty Taras, who provide some of the best translations of animation-art-to-comic-panels I’ve ever seen. They are as pure to the original source (Taras created Huey and Tendlar was the series main director) as Connie Rasinski’s Mighty Mouse comics for St. John’s, and Gene Deitch’s occasional Tom Teriffic comic pages for Pines.

Amazon has just posted several pages from the book online, including the first Huey comic story from St. John’s Casper No. 1, published in 1949, a full year before Huey’s onscreen debut!

If I were in San Francisco this Friday, I’d attend this. The Harvey Comics Art Show, which began June 28th at the Cartoon Art Museum, will host an opening reception on Friday, August 1, from 7-9pm. Lots of original artwork (including pages by Kremer, Post, Muffatti, Taras and others) tracing the history of the comics company are on display and Harvey scholars Mark Arnold and Dave Holt will be on hand Friday to answer questions.

I hope to make it out there in October to sign copies of the Baby Huey book. Details to come. The Harvey art will be on display in San Francisco through November 30th. A New York show is in the planning stage.

Oh, I get it - the operative word here is “cartoons”, and the joke is that the current political situation is a different “cartoon” from the one Jeffy and PJ usually watch. Ha. Ha. That’s a real knee-slapper. I’ve got nothing against The Family Circus and I’m not trying to turn into the Comics Curmudgeon - but today’s Family Circus is badly written and poorly composed. Perhaps they should leave the political humor to Garry Trudeau.

Take note: Ray Billingsley’s syndicated comic strip, Curtis, is referencing out-of-work Disney 2D animators in this week’s continuity. (click here for Tuesday’s strip, here for Wednesday’s, Thursday’s and Friday’s).

(Thanks, Uncle Wayne)

When I seek out films for my Worst Cartoons Ever! screenings or Cartoon Dump I look for animation so bad it’s unintentionally funny. So when I came across a batch of old issues of My Weekly Reader I had in stashed my archives and found this comic strip - Uncle Funny Bunny and Chumpy - I felt I’d found a comics equivalent to Paddy The Pelican and Bucky and Pepito: the lamest comic strip ever created! Mesmerizingly so. I just had to share. Click on thumbnails below to read some samples.

Admittedly it’s aimed at children, and produced in the more innocent era of the early 50s. But the consistently corny gags, the awful stiff artwork… surely this takes the prize. Unless one considers the Weekly Reader’s back up strip: Loki, Your Fuzzy Forest Friend.