Strawberry Shortcake is getting a face-lift. American Greetings Properties the owners of Strawberry Shortcake worked over a year to update the popular 80’s icon for young girls. Hasbro unveiled a whole new line of toys based on the slick new “fruit-forward” makeover, a phrase coined by the rights holder. When characters become stagnant, there is little choice but to reboot the franchise. Characters like Mickey Mouse are due for a new makeover according to Disney. Looney Tunes have in many reincarnations redesigned their characters to lackluster success. Look for Care Bears American Greetings Properties another to get a makeover soon.

Dumm Comics is a unique idea. It’s not everyday animators pool their talents together and create an online line of weekly strips. Heavily influenced by their background, the strips look like cels of animation frozen to capture the essence of the strips. The line so far will have the following animators who will garnish a following for sure online. So look out for the following creative collection of diligent souls, Sean Szeles, Katie Rice, Luke Cormican, Ricky Garduno and Fred Osmond.

It’s always a treat to see Fantagraphic’s Ghost World artist Dan Clowes doing New Yorker magazine covers. This week he managed to do two variant covers for our captive eyes.

It’s hard to stay ahead of the game when you are up against a juggernaut such as Marvel and DC comics. Andy Runton has paved his own road for many years with Owly. His creation Owly is for all ages. He has created along with his mother Patty Runton lesson plans in conjunction with his books. These lessons are made to help kids acquire visual interaction in relation to the world around them. Andy created a 30 page PDF book for all to use in the school system to help kids read in visual sequence and grasp the basic concepts of storytelling.  Andy and Owly give a hoot and are leading the way in helping kids and teachers at the same time. Andy is one of those gentle souls who gives his all in his creations and his passion shines all the time in his books. Download Owly Lesson Plans>>

Here is a new trend that will flow into many other mediums, the norm as of late as witnessed by "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" an online illustrated diary has found success in printed form an other sites are reaping the rewards as publishers google for new projects. Diary of a Wimpy Kid has now jumped into the movie realm to be adopted into a franchise.  This phenomena is spilling over as many online projects are making it into print form as is the case with Stefan G. Bucher’s "Daily Monster" is now available as a book. Stefan makes monsters out of any ink blot and has done so with a daily segment to watch each day. An original concept and fruitful considering it merited publication. The book comes with a DVD chronicling each monster as it was created, imagination run amok as Stefan can create anything out of an ink splash and himself has made his own splash on daily clicks as people discover his site each day. Here is one guy who will have black ink running for sometime.

The kids are alright at Drawn and Quarterly with the upcoming new collected works of master cartoonist Doug Wright. Doug Wright is comparable in Canadian hierarchy in the cartooning world as a Charles Schultz. There is not much on Doug Wright when it comes to published material, however, Seth and Drawn and Quarterly are about to remedy that with their collected works of Canada’s purloined cartoonists. Many people will be shocked in wonderment to an Canuck icon who was left in the cold for many years. Let the thawing begin and the world will see why an award was named after the cartoonist, Doug Wright will once again shine in his own bright light. Here is a glimpse of Seth’s montage work on the much acclaimed work of Doug’s body of work. Seth has corned the market on book montage for the cartooning master. His long run on the newly collected works of Peanuts has garnished him many accolades, in my opinion he is Canada’s version of Chip Kidd. This one book you will not want to miss. The cover is classic send off to the Penguin Books of old, it’s a thing of beauty. See Doug Wright interview>>

The majority of well known publishers at one time and many still cater to kids with a spin-off versions of their "adult" magazines. Now Mad magazine has at one time been considered as a juvenile magazine by many parents when Mad was a pop phenomena. Now going ten issues strong, Mad Kids is a magazine geared to the tykes, with what I would consider baby versions of their stable of characters including Alfred E. Neuman. I don’t know the success of this magazine, but the effort is there to bring in new readers. There are other magazines by Nickelodeon who are doing a great job with their own line, seems lately the flood gates are wide open with these type of magazines. Recycled brain candy we feed our kids, with ads about the latest gaming offerings. See more>>

Photoshop can be an intimidating program with people who don’t have a learning curve. Photoshop comes down in a strip down version with the Elements package or the CS one. Trade Loeffler the online artist of Zip and Li’l Bit comics, a regular on Lunchbox Funnies has a new exciting feature on how he uses Photoshop. Like any tool, everybody handles it a bit different. It’s always a treat to see an artist who uses these tools and how you can incorporate them into your own work.  Read Trade’s interview >>

Bubblegum cards are not what they used to be. In my youth, if you had pocket change you bought yourself a pack of cards. They were not collector items. Embedded in the cards was this distinctive stick of gum with a powdery covering that made the cards smell of bubblegum. Most kids would look at the cards and stack them in their rooms. Summer would come around and we would grab a few clothespins and attach the cards to the wheel frame of our bicycles and the cardboard card would  make a load sound as the card hit the spokes of the wheel. We thought our bikes sounded like motorcycles, but mostly we were obnoxious with our clattering through the lanes of our houses. Suburbia got rid of lanes, kids used to flock in lanes and use their imagination. Now they are regulated to homes and the video games take them to worlds never found in lanes. We had Pong back then, but that didn’t keep us entertained for long, until Pac-Man showed up in local convenience stores, and the kids disappeared from the lanes and loaded the machines with continuous quarter after quarter. Bubblegum smell brings me to those days, and this fun site collects the cards of those serene times in the 70’s when you didn’t have to get plastic sleeves for your cards, they were spoke food for all to taste as we popped wheelies with our own custom made bicycles that fueled our imagination.

In the industry the regular staff at Mad Magazine are known as "the usual gang of idiots", they gave the reigns to some of the top Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists in the industry free reign to bushwhack their good old president of the United States. This is a ploy that their editor would pull if he were alive to day. As much as I like Mad, I truly think their days are long gone. They magazine is now in color, and the humor is tame, there are other venues out there who do a better job. Mad will make way of the Dodo bird as will the newspapers to the Internet. There used to be a day when they parodied you and it was the equivalence of an Andy Warhol 15 minute fame. Big deal if you make it on Mad today, the tabloids is where you want to be.  It’s too bad, many creative people have gone through the Mad revolving doors, the mag owes a life line to Warner Brothers. If it were to exist as a sole entity, it would long cease to exist. With deep pockets from Warner, Mad is just a token to the print industry or just a mini hype-machine for the Mad TV Show, a dreadful rip of Saturday Night Live. Alfred I would be worried, your mag is old school, teach us a new trick.