Suuuure. But he still won and *took the prize. * Technically, it wasnt against the rules (then) but it’s still cheating.
He also weathered some really bad publicity and never tried anything like that again. Out of curiosity, which other contestant should have gotten the prize instead?
Give me all the materials and make me a judge, and I’ll give you a fair and unbiased answer.
Actually, I just looked up the nominees for the 1999 Ignatz Awards and have to retract some of my earlier comments. There were definitely some worthy nominees:
Liberty Meadows #1 (Frank Cho, Insight Studio Group) *
American Splendor: Transatlantic Comics (Pekar, Sacco, Stack & Warneford)
Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight (James Sturm, Drawn & Quarterly)
The Jew of New York (Ben Katchor, Pantheon Books)
Oracle (Joe Zabel & Gary Dumm, Amazing Montage)
In Frank’s defense, he was very young at the time and hasn’t done anything like this since. He’s grown a lot as an artist since then, too.
And, I have to admit Liberty Meadows is pretty good.
I still subscribe to a daily newspaper, and while it’s not for the comics, the comics page is the first I turn to.
A few years ago Scott Kurtz of PVP tried to get into print news papers and it did not work out.
For people who are interested in where comics are going should watch the documentary Stripped. It is really good. lots of interviews with established print artists. Like Bill Watterson, Greg Evans, Jim Davis, Mort Walker and tons of web comics creators.
http://www.strippedfilm.com/
How does any of this rise to the level of injustice?
Well, we want to encourage new artists right? How is running Peanuts, a strip by a long dead man, doing that?
I love Comics Curmudgeon, it often makes me laugh more than any comic!
The Foobiverse’s Journal is a strange thing. I read it for years up till the end of For Better or For Worse, and the critiquing was pretty interesting. In the last few years, though that strip is re-runs, whoever is writing the FJ is not just critiquing strips from years ago, but is so viciously attacking Lynne Johnston personally, laboring mightily every day to make some kind of sneering dig at her, that I think they are - seriously - mentally ill. They’re obsessed with her! They talk about her life, her family, her travels, her retirement, her marriages like deranged stalkerish head cases. All the better to tie into whatever is wrong with the strip that day. Creepy!
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, by drawing in and captivating new comic-strip fans. You think Mary Worth is gonna do that?
Mary Worth is also no long done by the original writer and artist, bith are long dead.
But no, since i dont think Peanuts brings in new comic-strip fans, just the old fans who have never seen a paper without it.
I’ve never read a Peanuts comic, as far as I can remember, but if they were good then and are good now I have no problem with them continuing to see print.
My local paper stopped running Doonesbury and replaced it with some Far Side knockoff called “Wumo”. I was displeased and told them they had a moral obligation to run Doonesbury as long as their competition was running “Mallard Filmore”, which has to be the nonfunniest thing ever.
Little kids are seeing it for the first time. They can draw Charlie Brown and Snoopy, which is a huge factor in why kids love it. The humor is timeless. What new strips have all that going for it?
Garry Trudeau hasn’t been writing new daily Doonesbury strips since 2013, as he’s been working on Amazon’s web series “Alpha House”. He’s doing new Sunday strips now, but apparently his syndicate has been running old Doonesbury strips Mon-Sat. (The Chicago Tribune replaced Doonesbury with Animal Crackers, which is quite possibly the unfunniest strip I’ve seen in many years.)
Who reads Rex Morgan? Who reads Mary Worth?
The same very old people who still read newspapers.
And someone get those Renoir paintings out of the art galleries! That asshole’s been dead for I don’t know how long 
Given the way his last couple of strips crashed & burned, this is probably for the best. If Berkely Breathed follows his recent pattern, he’ll be losing interest in the strip right about now.
I stopped going there several years ago because all of his targets were painfully obvious-he never expanded beyond the same 8 or so ancient/zombie strips. The only thing more boring than a comic strip which has died creatively is a blogger who can’t stop riffing on them.