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Terry LaBan

American cartoonist

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 16, 2026
Entity authorityQ7704647
Source-derived summary

Terry LaBan (born July 19, 1961) is an alternative/underground cartoonist and newspaper comic strip artist. He is known for his comic book series Cud, and his syndicated strip Edge City, created with his wife, Patty LaBan, a couples and family therapist.

LaBan is known for his sympathetic and believable characters, real-life dialogue, tight cartooning style, and straightforward storytelling.

Early life and education

LaBan grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, graduating from the University of Michigan.

Career

Political cartoons

LaBan began his career in 1986, freelancing political cartoons for the Ann Arbor News. He's been staff illustrator and political cartoonist for the progressive political magazine In These Times since 1990.

Unsupervised Existence

LaBan's first foray into comics was his series Unsupervised Existence, published by Fantagraphics beginning in 1989. Loosely based on LaBan's own life at the time, Unsupervised Existence was a semi-humorous comic book soap opera that followed the adventures of Suzy and Danny, a young, bohemian couple living in Cleveland. Suzy, an underemployed intellectual, spends a lot of time hanging around with her friends and trying to figure out what to do with her life. Danny, her boyfriend, supports them both by driving a cab, but his true vocation is poetry, which he self-publishes, along with the work of his fellow cabbies.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Terry LaBan” as american cartoonist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Terry, LaBan and American.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1961, 1986, 1990, 1989—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1961-07-19. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Terry, LaBan and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Terry LaBan”, the useful work is to connect “american cartoonist” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7704647. VIAF identifies the subject as 161762564. The Library of Congress control number is n98055404. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1986, 1990 and 1989.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Terry LaBan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.