Thadeus & Weez: about Us

Thadeus & Weez is a weekly, political comic strip by Charles Pugsley Fincher. The strip runs on the opinion pages of 10 dailies and one online newspaper. The daily newspapers are the Houston Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Austin AmericanStatesman, Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Amarillo Globe-News, Sherman Democrat, Tyler Morning Telegraph, Odessa American, Kerrville Daily News, Valley Morning Star. The papers run Thadeus & Weez on Saturdays or Sundays.

Thadeus & Weez runs online in the Houston Chronicle's Internet edition's Comics Page and Editorial Page . Content Editor Jim Townsend posts a new strip each Friday. If you click on "All Strips" in this site you'll reach the Chronicle's collection. The online Chronicle also archives several years of Thadeus & Weez with links to other years at the bottom of the current year's page.

We've created a separate collection of Thadeus & Weez strips about campaign 2000 that features George W. Bush, Al Gore, Bill Bradley, John McCain and the other candidates. This collection is called Campaign Comix . The collection also has an archive of strips about Bush as governor of Texas.

The first Thadeus & Weez ran in January,1985 , in the Texas Lawyer, a weekly legal newspaper. Douglas Tinker, the famous criminal lawyer from Corpus Christi, had written to the newspaper suggesting it use Fincher's work. The paper's editor, Gary Hengstler, called Fincher and asked him to create a new comic strip for the Texas Lawyer. Since then, Hengstler has gone on the become the editor and publisher of the ABA Journal in Chicago.

The original strip was directed at lawyers. Fincher, a lawyer, chose the name Thadeus & Weez for the strip because it had a sort of comic law-firm ring. He decided on Weez, a weasel, as Thadeus' side-kick since that's what many think of lawyers.

Within a few strips, Thadeus & Weez moved from being a law strip to one about Texas politics. Though the strip has often made forays into national politics, it made the change from being a Texas strip to the national political scene when the Texas Legislature ended its session May, 1999. With Gov. George W. Bush running for president, the time seemed right.

Thadeus & Weez is about political humor. The strip satirizes politics without regard to political party. Hypocrisy is a favorite target. The language of politics is rich, politicians frequently funny -- often funnier than political humorists.

Legal Isms is Fincher's newest strip. It's for What's New, an online newsletter for Lexis-Nexis. Editor Bob Bernard contacted Fincher about creating a lawyer strip for the newsletter and the result is Legal Isms. Bernard posts a new strip about every two weeks. He has has also created an archive of past Legal Isms strips at the Lexis-Nexis site. Beware, the strip is inside-baseball stuff for lawyers and not the traditional lawyer-bashing you usually see in cartoons. But Legal Isms does have barbs.

CARTOONIST Fincher moves back and forth between his career in cartooning and his career in law. In law he is of counsel to The Allison Law Firm in Brownsville, Texas, a litigation boutique. Fincher also paints in oils and acrylics and writes for newspapers. He's a serious, though not fast, jogger and also weight trains. Every day that it's possible, Fincher loads his four dogs into his Jeep drives north of the town where they can swim in the bay.