Ben Towle

Hahaha I love that she has a giant "AACK" on the wall in her studio!

Aack Cast by Jamie Loftus Society & Culture Podcast · Weekly Series · Aack! Cathy, the iconic and much-maligned comic strip by Cathy Guisewite, chronicled the day-to-day tribulations of its titular working woman for 35 years, ...

Thanks!

The AAACK Cast podcast was also great:

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a...

Does This Zeitgeist Make Me Look Fat?: An Overdue Appreciation of “Cathy” Across five decades of adulthood, every woman I have ever known was familiar, often intimately, with Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy (1976-2010). Our heroine’s struggles with new and old gender roles, the …

Wait, I'm wrong, There was *one* bit of CATHY 50th coverage I read a while back and it's a really great bit of writing:

panelsandprose.com/2025/11/14/d...

Fittingly, it’s a paperbACK!

I’m sorry I’m gonna go hide now.

Hahahahaha

Cathy 50th Anniversary Collection - Andrews McMeel Publishing Take a trip down memory lane with this celebratory 50th anniversary collection of Cathy Comics, curated from an iconic 34-year run of the beloved comic strip. The Cathy comic strip debuted in 1976, th...

Wow this 50th anniversary CATHY box set looks really beautiful... and it's been out since *October*?? I've seen exactly zero press/advertising about it. Crazy.

publishing.andrewsmcmeel.com/book/cathy-5...

#truth

It's obviously pretty crude relative to what he'd later become... but you can kinda see his style already!

And finally, this. This is the first science fiction story illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, who would later go on to draw Valerian and Lauraline! Done in 1956.

We also got this batch of Hiroshi Kaizuka pages from a story that ran in Shonen Jump in 1979. I absolutely love the crowd scenes here--and especially that big panel in the last page. I don't think Hiroshi Kaizuka has ever had anything translated into English? Zero Fighter Red is is best-known work.

Here's a few very cool originals Rebecca and I acquired at auction recently. This first lot is a couple of pages from a baseball manga (obviously). It was wrongly attributed to Shinji Mizushima. It's seems pretty clearly to be Hiroshi Kaizuka--from a rental manga called Lucky 9.

Suitable for framing ™️

The manga is GREAT!

YouTube video by Crunchyroll Witch Hat Atelier | Official Trailer 2 | Crunchyroll

Babe wake up, new Witch Hat Atelier anime trailer just dropped.

(If the whole show looks like this, it's gonna be amazing... but that's a big "if.")

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrCd...

Picked up a Shaun the Sheep pin at the Cartoon Museum in London! Now added to the lot.

Catching up on Mensuel Charlotte on the plane back from Thought Bubble. LOL'ing at Chris Ware inserting Charles Schulz into this strip as the granddad. (Hilariously, he's describing sneaking over a sand dune as a kid to watch the girls swimming naked at the beach.)

Beautiful sketch by Posy in
Cassandra Darke (a book which, inexplicably, has never had a U.S. release).

Jack Cole incorporating SFX into panel design for maximum storytelling impact. Look at the KABOOM-crackling becaue of impact of explosion
The doorknob breaking through glass and out of panel!
Genius

Amazing early Posy Simmonds magazine parody drawing.. plus some modern process work.

Thought Bubble day one. Paul Gravett interviewing Posy Simmonds!

In case you were wondering to what extent anime is now mainstream media in the US:

Hahaha sad but true, Toth is a "cartoonist's cartoonist" no matter the language.

Also this is literally the first time I've seen someone cite Alex Kotzky of Apartment 3-G as an influence ( and I had no idea "3-G" = "3 girls"?)

Two panels. In the first, two large hands grab a man's head from behind. In the second panel, the heads comes off and the body collapses.

I am reading some Little Orphan Annie comic strips from 1947 and this dude just had his head ripped right off. No blood though. Guess that would have been too gruesome.

The Billy's now going to be closed for a while for renovations--until May 😢 BUT will re-open with a big Chris Ware exhibit!

Motion Lines How do you show motion in a medium that doesn’t move?

The exhibit I co-curated at The Billy Ireland, Motion Lines: How Cartoonsts draw Movement, closed this past weekend... but if you missed it there's now this great online version--one of the very few they've done this for!

storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7b5c...

people bitch about woke media but if TOS was on today they would go to a thinly-veiled MAGA planet where the locals worshipped guns and then kirk would hit the orange dictator with a two-fisted karate chop before giving a lecture about how science is real and violence is bad

Which other French festivals do you think are in contention to be a potential Angoulême successor.

Got a modern Kindle with a 7" screen mainly for manga reading. (Keeping my ancient 5th gen with 5" screen for prose books). It's... workable, but damn, just make a tankōbon-sized e-reader, you cowards!

There was a huge protest during the festival last year.

Yeah, I saw that on IG this morning. The Nouveau Monde tent could be a desert.