Cartoonists

Two plumbers working on a sink with an alligator coming out of the faucet? Yes. Two drunks brainstorming about starting the Drinking Network? No. A guy with his hand chopped off pointing the way to the Islamic court? Ahhhhhh ... maybe. It's Wednesday afternoon and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, is picking cartoons. A few minutes ago, Bob Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor, entered Remnick's office carrying three wire baskets and 81 cartoons.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist is lending his talents to a crime-fighting television show in an attempt to track down the killer of a young musician who was slain nearly three decades ago. Berkeley Breathed, best known for the 1980s political cartoon "Bloom County" and the quirky "Opus" comic strip, has more than a passing interest in the 1979 case. Authorities believe the killer may have burglarized Breathed's home when Breathed was a student at the University of Texas in Austin.

MOSCOW-BORN, Los Angeles-based artist Roman Genn has come a long way from drawing Communist propaganda cartoons as child. His incisive caricatures have appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country, often generating controversy with what he's called the "ethnic grievance industry." Now the libertarian-leaning artist has created a series of paintings of political figures from the past and is working on a group of portraits of U.S.

"I think what we're waking up to is how much of the culture was expressed through the work of 20th century cartoonists, whose lives are still obscure to us," says David Michaelis, whose "Schulz and Peanuts," a landmark biography of Charles Schulz, was just released. Landmark, in that it's the most significant work written about one of the century's undisputed pop culture giants but also in that it's the most exhaustive biography ever of an American cartoonist.

I. "I do believe he sees me." --"Rad Balls," stories by Brian Canning, drawings by Mel Kadel * Once upon a time, comic book artist Travis Millard met love-of-his-life illustrator Mel Kadel in a ladies' lavatory. Though it is to this day the subject of some debate, Travis wasn't in the women's bathroom of the Little Joy bar that night being a sicko pervert. He was, instead, drawing on the walls.

A Cuban American editorial cartoonist wearing camouflage and armed with what turned out to be a toy gun stormed into the Miami Herald building Friday to confront an editor he said was destroying a Spanish-language sister paper and allowing Cuban exiles to be humiliated. A three-hour standoff ensued, with police SWAT teams crouching among the palm trees outside the six-story newspaper offices on Biscayne Bay, before the man identified as Jose Varela, 50, surrendered to police without incident.

"Prickly City" continues with guest cartoonists this week while its creator, Scott Stantis, recuperates from rotator cuff surgery. Different cartoonists will fill in each day of this final week of Stantis' recovery, continuing today with "Lio" creator Mark Tatulli.

When Will Eisner died early this week following complications from coronary bypass surgery, more than a few of his cartooning peers noted that it felt as if he'd been cut down in his prime, despite his being 87. Outside the world of comics, few people knew his name; within comics, he was legendary as the cartoonist who opened up the possibilities of his medium multiple times over the course of six decades.

THE sandy-haired man was only an amateur and his opponent a Goliath. Yet this David -- actually Peter Relic, a 33-year-old tool sharpener from Eagle Rock -- showed no fear. "Let me get my arsenal ready," he said, as he weighed his choice of weaponry. Ballpoint or Sharpie? Thick or thin? Color or not? These were the challenges Relic and his opponent, comic-book artist Ron Rege Jr., faced in equipping themselves for the 60-second contest to come.