Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Matt Bors is my favourite editorial cartoonist. He is one of few in his field whose work redefines what an editorial cartoon looks like. Often in comic strip form, you will find none of the traditional labeled (and laboured) metaphors that you might find in other cartoonists’ work.

As a fan of cartooning as an art form, what I appreciate most about Matt is his critical eye and vocalness about the state of editorial cartooning. In the same way that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show lampoons and takes a critical look at news media, exposing its shortcomings, so Matt does with editorial cartooning via his blog.

Matt warns us with a Crying Turd Alert when an editorial cartoonist phones in an obituary cartoon by drawing a fill-in-the-blank shedding a single tear. Then there’s the Excessive Labeling Award to cartoonists whose work is plagued with labels on every figure or element in the cartoon. And Matt’s not shy to call someone out on the lazy choice to use Photoshop in lieu of an actual drawing.

When Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays died back in June, Matt whipped up a parody of the tired and lazy celebrity-at-the-pearly-gates trope, which turned out to be a sad premonition of things to come.

And today on his blog, Matt reposted a cartoon from last year to warn us of what we might expect from other cartoonists come Halloween:

Here’s an interview with Matt, conducted by Daryl Cagle at this year’s American Association of Editorial Cartoonists Convention:

You can subscribe to Matt’s blog where he posts his cartoons, but you can also subscribe via Comics.com. The latter requires user registration to access the RSS feed, but the feed images are larger than on Matt’s blog, and you can add any of the other comic strips and editorial cartoons from the site as well. Finally, Matt is also on Twitter as @mattbors.