~openculture | Bookmarks (3)

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 that it ran in newspapers for only a decade, from 1985 to 1995: barely an existence at all, by the standards of […]

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 that world-famous comic strip but drew it single-handed throughout its entire run. He was, as […]

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 “personified irritability.” But it would take him another decade or so to become more than an incompetent, quick-to-anger foil for Mickey Mouse. It would also […]