Los Angeles Times

Mimi Pond helps keep comics alive in LA Times

Hollywood Forever by Mimi Pond (click to read)

With newspapers continuing to make cuts to their comics pages, we’re really fortunate to see the Los Angeles Times continue to feature Mimi Pond by publishing her ongoing series of op-ed comics about life in LA. For Halloween, the LA Times’ Opinion L.A. blog ran “Hollywood Forever,” a comic about the odd cemetery of the same name in east LA.

Mimi Pond is a local (since 1990 – basically a native!) cartoonist who has had her work published in National Lampoon, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe and others. In 1989, her comics friend Matt Groening asked her to write an episode of his new TV series The Simpsons. That episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” ended up being the first episode aired and was later nominated for two Emmy Awards. She also wrote an episode for the fourth season of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and the final season of the sitcom Designing Women. But her heart has remained with comics, contributing to Seventeen Magazine, Adweek, among other publications. She’s also had several collections of her work released with a new original graphic novel currently in the works.

The LA Times has been lucky to have her. Unfortunately it’s tough to find a complete directory of all of her comics on LATimes.com (their search engine is awful). So, here’s my swing at it. Please email with any info on ones I’ve missed or corrections. Most recent is at the top. I’ll try to add to the list as new ones are published and/or posted by The Times.

This Friday is brought to you by Hugging Kitteh

Things to do in and around LA this weekend:

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the USC Campus, Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM and Sunday 10 AM to 5 PM. Admission is free!

The FoB commercial:

The 45 Show gallery closing event at the Twenty Miles East Gallery in Pomona, Saturday 5 PM – 10 PM. RSVP on Facebook

Wizard World Anaheim Comic-Con in the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim (duh), Orange County, Friday through Sunday. On-site tickets: $35/per day or $55 for 3-day ticket. RSVP on Facebook

Someone make this: Searchable database of comic strips in major newspapers throughout history

I was hoping to find something like this but for the Boston Globe instead of The Oregonian (scan from Jonathan Shipley's Writer's Desk blog)

I was trying to figure out what comic strips were running in The Boston Globe when I started reading the comics section as a young lad. I know there was Garfield, probably the Amazing Spider-Man strip, Peanuts most likely, For Better or For Worse probably, but I can’t really remember what else. I think I started regularly reading the comics pages just before Calvin and Hobbes started, as I remember that being “the new strip”. So probably around 1984? I would love to have that information.

I was hoping I could find a scan of a random page from the ’80s to help refresh my memory. You can find everything online, so I figured this might take some clever Googling but should be doable. Well, apparently not. (Or I’m just not a very good Googler.) I did an image search at “the Google” for said random scan but no such luck. Then I did a search of all the internets, every single one of them, hoping for some ugly GeoCities fan site created by an obsessive-compulsive Globe reader who had cataloged every comics page, preferably using HTML tables and yellow font on a gaudy background. Maybe a dancing Calvin & Hobbes gif to really seal the deal? Well, GeoCities is gone, so maybe it took this hypothetical site with it. Once again, no such luck.

So this got me thinking. This is something that should be out there. All of the major newspapers with comics sections: The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune – it would be a great historical resource to know which strips ran in which papers when and for how long. (Last night on Twitter, I mistakenly included the New York Times in my initial wish list, but they don’t have a comics section.) Getting smaller papers would be great too but at least the major papers initially. And this information undoubtedly exists. The syndicates surely have extensive records of this information and more, although they probably have little motivation to provide it. So it will likely fall to the people to collect this information. So come on, everyone, let’s head to our local library‘s microfiche and get this going!