Google Honors Comic Artist Will Eisner's 94th Birthday...But Nothing for Reagan's 100th

March 6th, 2011 11:15 PM

The Washington Post's "Comic Riffs" blogger Michael Cavna reports "For comics fans, today's image may well be Google's greatest 'Doodle' yet. The latest Google logo celebrates what would have been the 94th birthday of one of the cartooning world's towering legends, Will Eisner. The home-page 'doodle' -- as the company calls each of them -- features Eisner's iconic character The Spirit" -- and some New York tenement buildings shaped into letters. (Eisner died in 2005.)

That's great for comics buffs. But Google can celebrate the 94th birthday of Will Eisner with a "doodle," and yet ignore President Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday? That's right. As Aaron Goldstein at the American Spectator noted on February 6, "On January 20th, Google marked the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Today, on the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, I looked at the Google front page and....nothing."

Using Goldstein's Google link, you can see that within days of Reagan's big cententary, they Google-doodle-celebrated across their global network the 183rd birthday of Jules Verne and the 164th birthday of Thomas Edison. In January, they did the same for painter Paul Cezanne on his 172nd birthday.

Last fall, Google globally celebrated the 160th birthday of author Robert Louis Stevenson, and unsurprisingly, the 70th birthday of Beatle legend John Lennon.