This Week's Sneak Peek

An addendum to Saturday's post: I was interested to learn that the Chicago Defender had its own cartoonist in 1919. Leslie Rogers drew editorial cartoons until suffering a stroke in 1928 (this site mis-identifies Rogers as a woman; photographs clearly show otherwise), as well as a Barney Google-esque comic strip, "Bungleton Green." He resumed cartooning once he was able, but died in 1935.

Chester Commodore was the Defender's editorial cartoonist when I was growing up. (He had also taken over the drawing of Bungleton Green in the 1950s, but had put the strip to pasture in 1964.) When the Defender announced a few weeks ago that it was suspending its print edition, I went hunting through my folders of clippings to see whether I had any Commodore cartoons in my files, and found that the only ones were in a 1981 Lutheran Magazine cover story about him. I guess I must have read the Defender only in libraries, because I can't remember anywhere that had it on the newsstand.

Since 2000, Tim Jackson has been cartoonist with Chicago Defender, which continues to publish on-line only. At least, I think he's still drawing for them. If he is, you'd think they would make it easier to find his cartoons on their website.