Dialogue from Richie Rich’s father also sounds very naturalistic when it comes from Mitt Romney.

(click to enlarge)

The late, great cartoonist Jeff MacNelly delivered this speech to the 1980 graduating class at Richmond’s Collegiate School, a private school. The father of one of the students in the audience that day was so impressed by MacNelly’s remarks that he asked him for a copy of the speech, and MacNelly obliged. He kept a copy of the speech, which the student recently chose to share. It’s remarkable how prophetic he was–one could easily imagine a commentator making the same observations today on themes such as freedom and sacrifice.

Click to enlarge and read MacNelly's manuscript

Editor’s note: The following article was originally published in the Henderson (N.C.) Daily Dispatch.

By David Irvine

Comic strips aren’t always funny — sometimes they can even carry a serious message.

During World War II, comic strip artist Milton Caniff interrupted the story line of his comic strip, “Terry and the Pirates,” to offer a Christmas tribute to the pilots ferrying supplies from India to our Chinese allies. On Dec. 25, 1944, his strip was titled “White Christmas–Himalayas Version.” It pictured a transport plane flying between snow-covered peaks. Caniff wrote that the pilots were doing their job so the folks back home “can look at the American sky and see nothing more dangerous than snow.”

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If you’ve read Hogan’s Alley #18, you read the article about Russell Stamm’s groundbreaking strip “Invisible Scarlet O’Neil.” Scarlet crashed the boys’ club of superheroes, combining sleuthing skills with an ability to become invisible (not to mention a touch of Golden Age cheesecake). Here, we present a complete daily sequence along (more…)

Hogan’s Alley #18 features a look at the life and career of “Penny” creator Harry Haenigsen and also featured lots of Penny art, some of the most inventive and stylized drawing of its era. But here, we want to present art that the print edition couldn’t accommodate and (more…)