Batboy Leaves Ballard

Seattlest should have mentioned by now the weeks-old news (months-old in blog years) that the cartooning chores for the Batboy comic strip appearing every week in America's Leading Newspaper have been outsourced from the quaint suburbs of Ballard to wherever the new cartoonist lives.

As mentioned here last summer when Seattlest suggested voting for WWN archiving the strip online, the Batboy has been rendered by HATE creator and Ballard resident Pete Bagge. His tenure with the character, which began in 2004 and ended just a few weeks ago, included a lot of hilarious counter-terrorism adventures, thwarting Al Qaeda schemes, suffering unspeakable torture at Gitmo and pissing off Ed Anger, all of which were beautifully drawn.

The cartooning torch has now officially passed to young newcomer Danielle Corsetto, who made her debut on the strip in the January 16th issue.

According to The Pulse, Bagge plans to devote more of his time to the Apocalypse Nerd series about some nerds stranded on a camping trip after Seattle is destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Collections of Bagge's run on Batboy can be found in his HATE Annuals (conflict-of-interest disclosure: a seattlest contributor sells ad space in HATE).

No word yet from Mayor Nickles on the expected impact Batboy's departure will have on the local economy, which raises the question: What does the mayor have to hide?