What they’re resorting to

Editor ZBicyclist is on vacation, and taking a cue from comics that repeat old episodes is dipping back into the past: June 2021. This was originally posted by EditorM. Is modal fabric still around?

I only recently learned there is a newfangled fabric called “modal”, popular for linens[*] and underwear; which mostly explains the modal-logic joke for me. But some of the rest of these are still puzzling.
[*] No, linens are not presumptively made from linen. Though they can be. Oy!

The Sesquicentennial in The New Yorker

Some cartoons from the 1926 sesquicentennial.


Well, that was a bust. From the point of view of New Yorker cartoons, the sesquicentennial was a non-event. That “Third of July” cartoon could have been done any year.

But as long as I’m here in the archive, let’s take a look at Central Park, 100 years ago. No gags here, just Helen E. Hopkinson’s observations.

More Fourth Wall

Boise Ed sends this in: “Here’s nother imaginative use of the Fourth Wall idea.”


I seem to remember Dagwood used to talk to the dog for this type of monologue, not directly to the reader.






Boise Ed notes, “You don’t get much more fourth-wall than this one.”