If you write or draw a webcomic (and at this point, who doesn't?), take a minute to vote in the eternally fascinating Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards. I'm not nominated for anything, probably because I didn't do much in 2007 except for Smithson, and Smithson clearly won't be recognized for its greatness until long after Brian and I have died lonely paupers' deaths in a Victorian-style gutter. Despite that, this year's nominations are actually pretty good, so go vote and get some talented people some fake awards.

Also, I forgot to mention yesterday that I've got a new "All the Comics in the World" column up on Comixology. This one is about all the original art I own. I swear eventually I'll get back to talking about All-Star Batman or something.

Andrew and I have developed a theory to explain Funky Winkerbean. In brief, Funky is the Picture of Dorian Gray of the comic-strip page. It takes onto itself the sins of other comic strips so that they can remain forever youthful and beautiful, reflecting those sins in its own cast's withered and twisted countenances. The people of Westview lose limbs, waste away from terminal diseases, and age decades in a flash, all so that Dagwood and Hagar the Horrible might never age.

Was Lisa's teen pregnancy in the 1990s caused by lustful thoughts Opus harbored for Lola Granola? Did Sarge's wrath toward Beetle Baily result in Wally's near-death from a landmine, or Becky's loss of an arm? I don't think there can be any doubt that Funky himself became an alcoholic as punishment for years of moonshine indulgence in Li'l Abner and Snuffy Smith, but what massive backlog of comic-strip sin gave Lisa terminal cancer? Will Tony Montoni someday pay for Garfield's gluttony with a tragic heart attack? And what monstrous crime against four-panel decency was vast enough to wipe out not only newscaster John Darling but his entire spinoff comic, Crisis on Infinite Earths-style? Also, what's up with Crankshaft?

Questions abound, but for now I advise readers simply to keep an eye on the funny pages. Wally is missing from the new "ten years later" cast, and that means somebody--I'm looking at you, Jeffy and PJ--has done something reeeeal bad.

Back when I did my awesome posts about Vassar cartoonists Anne Cleveland and Jean Anderson, I mentioned my fondness for 1930s-1950s magazine cartooning in general, and cited cartoonist Gluyas Williams as one of my special favorites. Now I want to show you how extremely great he is. Williams (1888-1982) drew for Life, Collier's, and The New Yorker, the Holy Trinity of magazine cartooning back in the day, but I first encountered his work through his illustrations for humorist Robert Benchley's essays. I was a big Robert Benchley fan in high school (pretty much any single one of my high-school interests could explain, all by itself, why I had no friends), and Williams' illustrations are inextricable from Benchley's work. They're like Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel, Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, peanut butter and chocolate.

Holy crap, did I ever want to be Robert Benchley. He wrote witty little essays, starred in witty little short films, had one of the greatest cartoonists of the age draw witty little pictures of him, toured the Walt Disney Studio in The Reluctant Dragon, dressed nattily, and hung out in the Algonquin Round Table. I might have wanted to be Robert Benchley even more than I wanted to be Dorothy Parker. There'd be a lot less wrist-slitting, for one thing.

Anyway, eventually I checked out some of Williams' other work, and it was really something. These scans are from The Gluyas Williams Gallery, a sampling of his illustrations, with the accompanyting text, published in 1957.

Before you click through the cut, however, I have a warning. If you are a cartoonist, prepare to be schooled. You think you have a clean line? You think you have an organic sense of form? Your line is hell of wobbly and your form is organic like a Twizzler, and also your spot blacks need work. Gluyas Williams is about to show you how a real pimp rolls.

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