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BY JEN VAUGHN – Read it and weep! Go have yourself a good cry (probably at a Disney movie). In the tradition of occasionally free newsprint tabloid comics like the one-shot Caboose and quarterly Smoke Signal, a collaborative comic will be available this weekend at MoCCA! Official press release below:

The word “comic” has always been a bit of misnomer and The Cartoon Crier hopes to set the record straight. Sorrow and woe is the focus of this free 36-page newspaper tabloid that highlights the work of members of The National Cartoonists Society and of The Center for Cartoon Studies’ community.

The Cartoon Crier will premiere on Saturday, April 28 at The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival (MoCCA) in New York City.

The Cartoon Crier features the saddest strips from iconic comics like Family Circus, Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, B.C., and For Better and For Worse. The Cartoon Crier also includes comics by Ivan Brunetti, Mell Lazarus, Melissa Mendes, Joe Lambert, Tom Gammill, Hilary Price, Laura Park, Richard Thompson, and Mo Willems as well as new work from the paper’s editors Cole Closser, R. Sikoryak, and James Sturm.

The Cartoon Crier will be available as a free download on May 1 from cartoonstudies.org.

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Jen Vaughn is ready to weep tears in four colors: CMYK.

capitalnewyork:

Lynda Barry on why she loved Bil Keane’s Family Circus

“MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE CARTOON OF ALL TIME IS: ARE YOU READY? It’s Family Circus,” Barry said at the Y. “You know that thing you hear of when you’re a kid that if you see beautiful art that you’ll burst into tears and around the same time you hear about that lady who, if she hits the right note she’ll blow up a wine glass? I always wanted to burst into tears in front of beauty, especially around a cute guy really close. He’d go, ‘she’s so sensitive.’ And I’d say, ‘I am.’ So what happened is I was travelling around Europe by myself and I was always at the galleries trying to burst into tears right?” It never happened.

But years ago, she went to a comics convention and met the illustrator behind Family Circus, which was created by Bil Keane and inked by his son, Jeff. “I burst into tears and it wasn’t cute at all,” she said. “I tried to introduce myself to him but I couldn’t stop crying.”

“The reason why I loved Family Circus so much was because I came from a very difficult, violent, horrible home and I look in that circle and see a happy little life. And I always wanted to get to it. And I realized when I shook his hand that I had come through the circle. I was on the other side. And the way I did it was by drawing a picture.”

Lynda Barry always says the right things. These are lovely words indeed.

RIP – ‘Family Circus’ creator Bil Keane dies at 89:

For more than a half century, Bil Keane’s clever “Family Circus” comics entertained readers with a mix of humor and traditional family values, intentionally simplistic because the author thought the American public needed the consistency. Keane, who started drawing the one-panel cartoon featuring Billy, Jeffy, Dolly, P.J. and their parents in February 1960, died Tuesday at age 89. His comic strip is featured in nearly 1,500 newspapers across the country. Jeff Keane, his son, said his father died of congestive heart failure.