The page of the country's newspapers can sometimes be rough - stories of crime and mayhem, contentious politics, and - depending your rooting interests - losing sports teams. But fortunately, there are always the comics to fall back on, some literal comic relief in the midst of everything else.
Just last month, some of the top names from the comics pages were in Kenosha. Not the characters, of course, but the cartoonists themselves. They were meeting fans - and sharing stories with each other at the annual Kenosha Festival of Cartooning. Today and tomorrow, we'll chat with a couple of cartoonists whose work is entertaining readers today.
When Hilary Price's strip, "Rhymes With Orange," hit the funny pages in 1995, she was the youngest woman ever with a comic strip in syndication, and 17 years later, she remains one of relatively few women in the field. "Rhymes With Orange" is a single panel strip that often pokes fun at the absurdity of our lives and also features the occasional groan-inducing pun. It now runs in 175 newspapers around the country.
Lake Effect's Mitch Teich caught up with Hilary Price onsite in Kenosha, and Price talked about the challenges and advantages of drawing a strip without regular characters, about how the strip comes together, and why James Joyce was an unlikely catalyst for her cartooning career.
- View several recent "Rhymes With Orange" strips, Copyright Hilary B. Price, Reprinted with permission of King Features Syndicate, Inc.
