Cherry-Picking Panels
Award entries & background on a recent cartoon
As I mentioned in Saturday’s Substack, the National Cartoonists Society nominated me for a 2025 Silver Reuben award in the Best Newspaper Panels division. NCS members are voting this month to determine the winners in each division, which will be announced at the annual meeting in August.
As you can see, I’m in the esteemed company of Dave Blazek and Bill Whitehead; both are excellent cartoonists and nice, friendly humans.
Hopeful scribblers submitted eight examples of their 2025 work in January. NCS jury committees reviewed the entries, then voted to narrow the field to three finalists in each division.
Choosing which ones to submit was a long process. From my personal favorites, I tried to show a variety of gags while giving some weight to the number of likes and comments each one received on social media.
Here’s the batch I finally settled on.
Of course, I started with a music-related panel.
This one’s not quite wordless, but it’s close, and the joke lands nicely.
This gag was popular among readers. Dan and I liked it, too.
A bit of religion and social commentary, as the supreme being chats with a Colbert-esque late-night host.
Inspired by actual events without being overtly editorial, the panel has remained timely since its November publication.
A representative punny caption.
Anteaters are always funny.
I closed out with another musical gag.
Whoever gets the Newspaper Panels award in August, it’s gratifying to know that NCS colleagues found these cartoons worthy to be finalists.
Don’t Throw Anything Away
Last week’s “Meet the Mnemonics” Bizarro resulted from this 2019 sketch. The concept of characters whose first names describe them seemed funny, but I thought there might be a better way to do the gag, so I set this aside—for seven years.
Sometimes an idea needs to marinate for a while.
Best of luck in the voting, partner. You're making everyone at Bizarro International Headquarters proud. (That would be me, Olive Oyl, our two dogs, and the cat.)
Your Toons are a Hoot. That's right, I said it. You can put that in your hidden pipe & smoke it.