Above are two cartoons by Ruben Bolling, who pens Tom the Dancing Bug, a brilliant mix of absurdity, irony, and satire. He's part of a small community of full-time alternative cartoonists. (The latest TtDB compilation is the 2004 Thrilling Tom the Dancing Bug Stories, and an overview of the genre can be found in Ted Rall's Attitude series.) Unlike strips like Garfield, Mary Worth, or Hagar the Horrible, alternative cartoons have to fight to survive, and their creators work for (ahem) peanuts. However, there was terrible news a few weeks ago: due to the recession, the largest altweekly syndicate, Village Voice Media, decided to cancel all cartoons in its dozen major weeklies. Many excellent cartoons will probably disappear. I can only hope there are enough fans willing to pay directly to keep the cartoons alive....and Blondie has been running 7 days a week for 80 years. There's no justice.
Update: I should add that alternative comics don't only face competition from daily three-panel gag cartoons; they also compete with an army of so-called editorial cartoons. Every paper has them, and 99% are utterly vacuous. Take a look at this collection of cartoons after Michael Phelps was photographed smoking pot. There is no insight and minimal artistic value. Invasion of privacy? Expensive and destructive War on Drugs? Distractions from real news? Why bother taking a stand when you can reinforce the readers' preconceptions?
A real editorial cartoon, by Matt Wuerker. He's not exactly incendiary, but even so he is only published in a few newspapers.
If you ever come across it, Art Spiegelman wrote a very insightful article for Harper's a few years ago about editorial cartooning called "Drawing Blood".
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