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The first thing the eye finds is not the word JESUS. It is the cape. On the shirt, the lettering runs in comic-style capitals—blocky, slightly italicized, the kind of display type that borrows its posture from a newsstand cover. Below or beside the words, depending on the crop, a gold cross stands upright. And from that cross, a red cape hangs. The cape is the whole argument. A cross is a static object, a vertical and a horizontal, an instrument of execution turned into jewelry. A cape is motion. A cape implies a body moving forward, a wind behind it, a silhouette that reads at a glance. Put the two…

The first thing the ghost does is refuse you. Arms folded. Mouth a flat line. The bedsheet hangs off the shoulders like a coat someone was told to wear and resents. Around it, in orange and cream, the lettering runs in a retro arc: THIS IS SOME BOO SHEET. A pumpkin sits somewhere in the composition, small and unbothered, like a prop the ghost did not ask for. That is the whole design. A grumpy ghost, a pun, a pumpkin. And yet the thing works, and it works for reasons a cartoonist can steal. The silhouette does the arguing Look at the ghost before you read a word. The shape…

The first thing I notice is the sunglasses. Not the ghost—the ghost is a bedsheet with a face, the oldest visual shortcut in the Halloween drawer. The sunglasses. Two black lenses on a white shape, and suddenly the ghost isn’t haunting anything. It’s holding two foaming beer steins, and the foam is drawn with the same scalloped line you’d use for a cloud in a gag panel. The lettering curves around the whole figure: I’M JUST HERE FOR THE BOOS. The apostrophe in I’M is doing quiet work. The pun is in the last word, but the contraction is what makes it a sentence a person would actually say. This…

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The first thing the eye catches is not the carrot. It is the sentence. LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW runs around four smiling root vegetables—carrot, radish, beet, onion—their roots visible in soil. The words form the border. The vegetables sit inside it like a panel within a panel. Before you read a single face, you have already read a full line of copy. That is the design’s first argument: the caption is not a caption. It is the frame. This is a specific drawing decision, and it is worth slowing down for. Most pun…

Two Decisions, One Career Here is a sentence that sounds like a single story: The Guardian ended Steve Bell’s If… after forty years, then rejected one of his cartoons. Here is the same sentence split into what the record actually shows: in 2021, a newspaper cut a long-running strip as part of a cost reduction and renegotiated its most expensive freelancer down to fewer drawings. In 2023, a different cartoon was refused, and Bell’s work for the paper stopped. Those are not the same event. They are not even the same kind of event. One is a contract story. The other is an editorial-review story. Treating them as a single…

GREETINGS arches over the cat like a banner at a county fair. HUZZ sits below it, flat and final, like a stamp on a passport. Between the two words is an orange tabby in a backwards red cap, holding a rainbow swirl lollipop in one paw, purple lightning cracking behind its head, and an expression that suggests it has just been handed a trophy for a contest it did not enter. That is the whole design. Two words, one cat, one lollipop, one bolt of purple weather. And yet the shirt works as visual rhetoric because of a single decision: the cat does not sell the joke. It refuses to.…