If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That comic strip’s cultural impact is even more remarkable considering ...
Anyone can learn to draw the cast of Peanuts, but few can do it every day for nearly half a century. The latter, as far as we know, amounts to a group of one: Charles Schulz, who not only created...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/17-minutes-of-charles-schulz-drawing-peanuts.html
Donald Duck first appeared in Disney’s 1934 cartoon The Wise Little Hen (below). In his subsequent roles, he quickly developed into that still-familiar figure the New Yorker once described as �...
Early in his collecting odyssey, animation historian, archivist, and educator Tommy José Stathes earned the honorific Cartoon Cryptozoologist from Cinebeasts, a “New York-based collective of f...
https://www.openculture.com/2023/12/the-beautiful-anarchy-of-the-earliest-animated-cartoons.html
Bugs Bunny is a quick-thinking, fast-talking, wascally force of nature, and a preternaturally gifted physical comedian, too. But unlike such lasting greats as Charlie Chapin and Buster Keaton, it...
Halloween looms. Have we got a tarot deck for you! Todd Alcott, the mad scientist responsible for Open Culture’s favorite midcentury graphic mashups, infuses his Horror Tarot with a century’s...
Note: Yesterday, Mad Magazine legend Al Jaffee died at the age of 102. Below, we present our 2016 post featuring Jaffee talking about how he invented the iconic Fold-ins for the satirical magazin...
Before the Industrial Revolution, few had occasion to consider the impact of technology on their lives. A few decades in, however, certain segments of society thought about little else. That, in ...
https://www.openculture.com/2023/03/the-march-of-intellect.html
Nobody interested in comics can pass through Amsterdam without visiting Lambiek. Having opened in 1968 as the third comic-book shop in human history, it now survives as the oldest one still in ex...
Growing up, there was always a special transgressive thrill in reading EC Comics, especially titles like Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear. That must have been eve...
Much has been said lately about jokes that “haven’t aged well.” Sometimes it has do to with shifting public sensibilities, and sometimes with a gag’s exaggeration having been surpassed by...
https://www.openculture.com/2022/08/when-we-all-have-pocket-telephones.html
Imagine if Franz Kafka were charged with picking the winning entries in The New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest. The punchlines might become a little more obscure. If that idea fills yo...
In light of its being recently banned in some settings, we discuss Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–91), which conveys his father’s account of living through the Holocaust. We also consider othe...
The popularity of graphic novels (and more than a few extremely lucrative superhero movie franchises) have conferred respectability on comics. Handsome reissues of such stunning early works as Wi...
https://www.openculture.com/2022/04/explore-a-big-archive-of-vintage-early-comics-1700-1929.html
How do you rescue a day that’s gone pear shaped? Stopping to drink a glass of water is one of our longtime go tos. If there’s a box of matches handy, we might perform Yoko Ono’s Lightning P...