Unless you’ve been at Daily Kos since the early days, you may not realize how much of the front-page content originated in the Community. Many staff writers and elections team members began as Community members, whose special interests and skills were first expressed in their personal Daily Kos blogs. The site lacked a comic strip, however, until 2010, when Eric Lewis, aka ericlewis0, launched Animal Nuz. Lewis distilled current events, progressive political views, art, humor, and occasionally Daily Kos members into four panels of a comic strip every week from 2010 to 2016. The first strip, published on July 6, 2010, introduced a TV news desk format, along with news anchors Oliver the cat and Daisy the dog. The strip covered three election cycles, GOP-fabricated crises, and environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, while crawls (strips of text) in each panel highlighted other news, real and imaginary, beginning with “whales to get krill vouchers.” This first strip is reprinted in full at the end of this story. I talked with Lewis about his background, inspiration, and favorite comics for this retrospective of Animal Nuz, which community member Angela Marx calls “​​spot on commentary cleverly disguised as a cartoon strip.” Read more