by Scott Ketcham
and Marcus Hamilton
Over twenty-five cartoonists have announced they will be taking part in the annual event No Pants Day tomorrow, to encourage people to donate clothes to local second-hand shops that have been severely affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The cartoonists involved will see characters in their respective strips donning their underwear to encourage awareness of the situation. Many of the cartoons involved in the initiative are owned by King Features Syndicate, such as “Blondie,” by the current team of writer Dean Young and artist John Marshall; “Zippy the Pinhead” by Bill Griffith; and “Rae the Doe” by Olive Brinker. Tea Fougner, the comics editor at King Features Syndicate, reached out to multiple other syndicates to get them involved too, with strips at the Tribune Content Agency, Andrews McMeel Universal, and Washington Post Writers Group all set to take part.
Fougner stated that, despite being “business competitors… we’re all part of the same family,” and that, “We all love comics and we love our communities. And, at the end of the day, that’s really what cartooning is about.” The results for the initiative were first seen behind-the-scenes in March after cartoonists were contacted in February, with Fougner promising “a variety” of results: some cartoonists are taking “a really direct approach where they have their characters in the comic donating clothing to people,” while others are “[depicting] the characters not wearing pants or [putting] a little happy No Pants Day message in the comic.”
No Pants Day takes place on the first Friday of May each year, and is believed to have originated at the University of Texas by students who felt that the end of the semester would be made more fun without any pants.
The scale of the No Pants Day initiative will be seen on May 7 with the strips’ daily publications.
