There’s a reason that the baroque era ended. This strip seeks to deny that. Bach, Handel, et al, will live forever. Chocolate shells will probably not.
In other words, yeah, I do not get this one.
The chocolates attacked. Sweeto wasn’t hurt, so the king figures
(correctly) that Sweeto is (or has) chocolate. He’s a generic
peanut M&M. The king removes his traitorous chocolate layer and
sends the inner nut to the chocolates.
I assume the humor is the ambiguity of “nut”.
I agree with Arthur’s explanation. Sweeto was a spy.
It’s complicated absurdism.
It actually works okay but I think it’d be better without the forced nut/testicle joke at the end.
The scenerio’s absurd but familiar. There’s political conflict in Candy Land were the rebel and outlawed chocolates are conducting raids and random attacks on the candies. This is the sole-survivor-of-an-attack-is-revealed-to-be-an-inside-agent scene that is so familiar. That’s the juxtaposing humor analogy; an M&M with a candy shell hiding a chocolate interior.
That’s actually…. really pretty good.
Unfortunately the rebels-recieve-a-gruesome-package-of-the-agent-dismembered-body-parts scene is forced and not anywhere as clever.
…. Or am I (and the cartoonist) assuming Game Of Thrones and spin-off gritty history drama scenarios are more ubiquitous than they actually are.
Bill has an amazing talent for digging up old PBF comics (this one is #129) that I cannot remember ever having reading (despite the fact that I downloaded the entire PBF archive a few years ago).
@Kilby: This one ran pretty recently at gocomics. They’ve upgraded from running the same 4 or 5 comics over and over to running about a dozen over and over.
I don’t think it is a nut=testicle joke as much as nut=head. The Sweets discovered the spy, killed him and sent his head in a box (Se7en style) back to his comchocriates.
Here’s a weird case where the lettering style is too elaborate for reading well in a comic.
Also, “Apackage” ?
The crammed in lettering hurts my eyes.
I found the URL for an alternate universe’s version of PBF.
I had no problem understanding this, but maybe it’s because I am a child of the 80s.
Way back in the 1980s, M&M chocolate candies were advertised on TV as “chocolate in a thin candy shell” (as well as melting “…in your mouth, not in your hand”).
The phrase “chocolate in a thin candy shell” kind of made it sound like the chocolate was being disguised as candy. As if being chocolate wasn’t enough to be declared candy; it was only candy because it was coated in a thin candy shell. (Had it lacked a thin candy shell, it might not be worthy to be called “candy”; I guess it would just be “chocolate.”)
So in this four-panel cartoon, a world is created where the Candy residents are at constant war with the Chocolate residents (obviously impostor candies). King Candy cares for all his subjects, of course, but is suspicious that Colonel M. M. Sweeto keeps surviving the Chocolates’ raids on Lollytown.
King Candy’s suspicion was well-founded, as it turns out that M. M. Sweeto was a Chocolate agent all along (disguised, you see, in a thin candy shell). And the irate king responds in a way that kings in ancient times might respond — by sending a body part — allowing for the fourth panel’s puerile pun
Welll, I’m a child of the 50’s, and I remember when all M&Ms were colored chocolate brown. Remember the commercial where the brown ones dived into a swimming pool of color and came out different colors?
Ah, nostalgia.
Sometimes I wish my nostalgic moments didn’t have quite so much to do with television,
I think if the joke was nut=testiticle, then nut would have been plural in the strip.
“testiticle” – is that a portmanteau, or an end run around filters?
“I think if the joke was nut=testiticle, then nut would have been plural in the strip.” But an M and M only has one.
“is that a portmanteau, or an end run around filters?”
C) just a typo
“an M and M only has one.”
No, M&Ms don’t have any testicles. Or if they do, ewww.
Chak, now that you mentioned it, I vaguely remember seeing a commercial with the M & Ms diving into a pool. I almost think the peanuts were diving in and getting coated with chocolate? In any event, I would have seen it in black and white, thereby missing the point of the colorful candy shells.
I don’t think the nut is a testicle joke — I think it’s his HEART. They’ve killed Sweeto and sent his heart to them in the same sort of package that he’d have been sending them information in.
How they recognize his heart vs anybody else’s, I’m not sure. But I think the horror isn’t that they’ve castrated him — it’s that they’ve executed and dismembered him.
probably from watching too much BBC and Benny Hill as a kid, and the Proper Top Gear Guys as an adult, Nut is English slang for noggin or head. The package in the last panel clearly shows something round and yellow….But having nuts is more of a chocolate thing than a sweet candy thing. Anyone else notice what looks like the modern Poop Emoji in the background?
I think the poop emojis are kisses, no?
While the nut pun is unavoidable, I figured that it was supposed to be like his skull. Though Ian’s idea of heart works equally well. There is the question of how anyone would recognize it as belonging to Sweeto, but I’m ignoring that. I blame the colorist for coloring Sweeto’s chocolate inside as RED in panels 2 & 3. That made it less clear what was happening there. (So did the mouth suddenly appearing at his shoulder and the fact that the king’s sleeve is also yellow.) But I had no issues following the sequence of events as woozy laid them out, even though I don’t watch Game of Thrones, though I do watch cop dramas and sci-fi.
Chakolate, you’re misremembering – M&Ms have always been in multiple colours (in fact, they discontinued a colour in the early 50s – violet), although the peanut ones were only in tan from their introduction until 1960, which is probably what you’re thinking of. I also remember the swimming commercial (so it must have lasted at least into the 80s), and it (obviously) didn’t have to do with introducing colours (which came from showering after swimming in chocolate, not the swim itself).
Chak, did you have a color television in the 1950s??
As I mentioned above, I think it most likely Nut refers to Head. Is it a Britishism then? We do say “use your nut” sometimes for use your head/brain. “This does my nut in” is something that drives you crazy.
The IRA Internal Security Unit, responsible for punishments including shooting people in the head, was known as The Nutting Squad ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Security_Unit ), and I think the Lollytown Security S.W.E.E.T. team nutted Agent Sweeto.
Even though I’m also put off by the crammed letters, I like how it feels when peanut butter cup’s “Guys! A Package from Agent Sweeto” runs into “oh my God!” (At first, that darn lettering had me wondering why they were calling him Agent *Sweet*.)
Mona is remembering the ad correctly, I misremembered that, but I know when I was a child the M&Ms were all chocolate brown. I remember being disappointed that the colors didn’t taste different.
I’m digging into it a little more, to confirm or contradict that, however it comes up.
Chak: Wikipedia says that the original colors of M&M’s were red, yellow, violet, green and orange.
I remember that commercial from when I was a kid – when I read your first comment I was sort of excited to find that they had just become colored then. Boo, KN, for ruining a great story with ugly facts! ;)
Well, that’s a different swimming commercial than the one that would have run in the 80s (it had multiple M&Ms of both varieties swimming, and showering), but the person who wrote the article seems to be remembering the same one I did…heh. (Also, sorry, Chak, for mixing you up with a different poster.)
@ Wendy – PBF is an independent webcomic: there’s no syndicated colorization, it’s all home grown.
“when I was a child the M&Ms were all chocolate brown.”
Certain rumors about green M&Ms were well-established by the time I was old enough to become aware of them.
I think one reason this cartoon is tricky to understand is because the last panel contains information necessary to understand the backstory concerning the warring factions. So it takes some study of the last panel (as well as the first) to properly get a sense of the imaginary world.
However, the last panel also contains the punchline, but the punchline doesn’t make much sense until you first understand the backstory of this fantastical world.
So this cartoon pretty much requires multiple readings, even if you have a sense of what the cartoonist is trying to “get” at.
I had no trouble understanding this one, and I think one of the reasons is that, if I see a yellow egg-shaped thing with arms, legs, and a face on it, in a candy-related context, I immediately think of J. K. Simmons’s Peanut M&M character, which he’s been playing for over twenty years. So it never occurred to me that Colonel Sweeto could have been anything OTHER than a peanut M&M. Thus, I immediately thought that he consisted of a peanut, surrounded by chocolate, surrounded by a yellow candy coating. So the moment that it was said, in the first panel, that chocolate candies and hard candies were at war, it became obvious that M&Ms could be undercover agents for the Chocolates.
But I think that if you don’t have the immediate association between an ovoid yellow candy with humanoid features and Yellow M&M, it would be harder to figure out.
If someone isn’t familiar with the look of the M&Ms spokescandies, Wikipedia provides the following image, which might explain why I immediately associated Colonel Sweeto with Yellow Peanut M&M:
Heh – it’s easy to be interested when all you have to do is send an email.
Okay, if anybody is still interested (or even if no one is), I talked to a Mars rep this morning, and as usual, my memory is half right, and half-arsed.
He said that the plain M&Ms have always been multicolored, but the peanut ones were all chocolate brown when they first came out.
So I am imagining remembering all-brown plain ones, but I’m not alone there. My sister also remembers them that way.
Small aside: when I emailed the company, I used my nom-de-plume, Chak Olate. I have to hand it to the rep, he didn’t even pause when I told him that was my name. hehe
As a very young children, my sister and I had Smarties or Bonitos (better because of the smile faces); my mother loved peanuts, so she had Treets but not us because “children choke on peanuts”.
Chak: Have to give KN credit: She correctly predicted at the start that you were thinking of the peanut ones.
Those collective false memories are hard to shake. I still feel sure that it’s spelled “Berenstein Bears.” :)
Olivier: When I was young, my best friend’s mother was driving a bunch of kids home, and gave them all some Smarties, which they had never had before. The kids went home, and told their parents how my friend’s mom was so great, because she had given them all pills. Hilarity ensued.
Comics I Don't Understand 
There’s a reason that the baroque era ended. This strip seeks to deny that. Bach, Handel, et al, will live forever. Chocolate shells will probably not.
In other words, yeah, I do not get this one.
The chocolates attacked. Sweeto wasn’t hurt, so the king figures
(correctly) that Sweeto is (or has) chocolate. He’s a generic
peanut M&M. The king removes his traitorous chocolate layer and
sends the inner nut to the chocolates.
I assume the humor is the ambiguity of “nut”.
I agree with Arthur’s explanation. Sweeto was a spy.
It’s complicated absurdism.
It actually works okay but I think it’d be better without the forced nut/testicle joke at the end.
The scenerio’s absurd but familiar. There’s political conflict in Candy Land were the rebel and outlawed chocolates are conducting raids and random attacks on the candies. This is the sole-survivor-of-an-attack-is-revealed-to-be-an-inside-agent scene that is so familiar. That’s the juxtaposing humor analogy; an M&M with a candy shell hiding a chocolate interior.
That’s actually…. really pretty good.
Unfortunately the rebels-recieve-a-gruesome-package-of-the-agent-dismembered-body-parts scene is forced and not anywhere as clever.
…. Or am I (and the cartoonist) assuming Game Of Thrones and spin-off gritty history drama scenarios are more ubiquitous than they actually are.
Bill has an amazing talent for digging up old PBF comics (this one is #129) that I cannot remember ever having reading (despite the fact that I downloaded the entire PBF archive a few years ago).
@Kilby: This one ran pretty recently at gocomics. They’ve upgraded from running the same 4 or 5 comics over and over to running about a dozen over and over.
I don’t think it is a nut=testicle joke as much as nut=head. The Sweets discovered the spy, killed him and sent his head in a box (Se7en style) back to his comchocriates.
Here’s a weird case where the lettering style is too elaborate for reading well in a comic.
Also, “Apackage” ?
The crammed in lettering hurts my eyes.
I found the URL for an alternate universe’s version of PBF.
I had no problem understanding this, but maybe it’s because I am a child of the 80s.
Way back in the 1980s, M&M chocolate candies were advertised on TV as “chocolate in a thin candy shell” (as well as melting “…in your mouth, not in your hand”).
The phrase “chocolate in a thin candy shell” kind of made it sound like the chocolate was being disguised as candy. As if being chocolate wasn’t enough to be declared candy; it was only candy because it was coated in a thin candy shell. (Had it lacked a thin candy shell, it might not be worthy to be called “candy”; I guess it would just be “chocolate.”)
So in this four-panel cartoon, a world is created where the Candy residents are at constant war with the Chocolate residents (obviously impostor candies). King Candy cares for all his subjects, of course, but is suspicious that Colonel M. M. Sweeto keeps surviving the Chocolates’ raids on Lollytown.
King Candy’s suspicion was well-founded, as it turns out that M. M. Sweeto was a Chocolate agent all along (disguised, you see, in a thin candy shell). And the irate king responds in a way that kings in ancient times might respond — by sending a body part — allowing for the fourth panel’s puerile pun
Welll, I’m a child of the 50’s, and I remember when all M&Ms were colored chocolate brown. Remember the commercial where the brown ones dived into a swimming pool of color and came out different colors?
Ah, nostalgia.
Sometimes I wish my nostalgic moments didn’t have quite so much to do with television,
I think if the joke was nut=testiticle, then nut would have been plural in the strip.
“testiticle” – is that a portmanteau, or an end run around filters?
“I think if the joke was nut=testiticle, then nut would have been plural in the strip.” But an M and M only has one.
“is that a portmanteau, or an end run around filters?”
C) just a typo
“an M and M only has one.”
No, M&Ms don’t have any testicles. Or if they do, ewww.
Chak, now that you mentioned it, I vaguely remember seeing a commercial with the M & Ms diving into a pool. I almost think the peanuts were diving in and getting coated with chocolate? In any event, I would have seen it in black and white, thereby missing the point of the colorful candy shells.
I don’t think the nut is a testicle joke — I think it’s his HEART. They’ve killed Sweeto and sent his heart to them in the same sort of package that he’d have been sending them information in.
How they recognize his heart vs anybody else’s, I’m not sure. But I think the horror isn’t that they’ve castrated him — it’s that they’ve executed and dismembered him.
probably from watching too much BBC and Benny Hill as a kid, and the Proper Top Gear Guys as an adult, Nut is English slang for noggin or head. The package in the last panel clearly shows something round and yellow….But having nuts is more of a chocolate thing than a sweet candy thing. Anyone else notice what looks like the modern Poop Emoji in the background?
I think the poop emojis are kisses, no?
While the nut pun is unavoidable, I figured that it was supposed to be like his skull. Though Ian’s idea of heart works equally well. There is the question of how anyone would recognize it as belonging to Sweeto, but I’m ignoring that. I blame the colorist for coloring Sweeto’s chocolate inside as RED in panels 2 & 3. That made it less clear what was happening there. (So did the mouth suddenly appearing at his shoulder and the fact that the king’s sleeve is also yellow.) But I had no issues following the sequence of events as woozy laid them out, even though I don’t watch Game of Thrones, though I do watch cop dramas and sci-fi.
Chakolate, you’re misremembering – M&Ms have always been in multiple colours (in fact, they discontinued a colour in the early 50s – violet), although the peanut ones were only in tan from their introduction until 1960, which is probably what you’re thinking of. I also remember the swimming commercial (so it must have lasted at least into the 80s), and it (obviously) didn’t have to do with introducing colours (which came from showering after swimming in chocolate, not the swim itself).
Chak, did you have a color television in the 1950s??
As I mentioned above, I think it most likely Nut refers to Head. Is it a Britishism then? We do say “use your nut” sometimes for use your head/brain. “This does my nut in” is something that drives you crazy.
The IRA Internal Security Unit, responsible for punishments including shooting people in the head, was known as The Nutting Squad ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Security_Unit ), and I think the Lollytown Security S.W.E.E.T. team nutted Agent Sweeto.
Even though I’m also put off by the crammed letters, I like how it feels when peanut butter cup’s “Guys! A Package from Agent Sweeto” runs into “oh my God!” (At first, that darn lettering had me wondering why they were calling him Agent *Sweet*.)
Mona is remembering the ad correctly, I misremembered that, but I know when I was a child the M&Ms were all chocolate brown. I remember being disappointed that the colors didn’t taste different.
I’m digging into it a little more, to confirm or contradict that, however it comes up.
Chak: Wikipedia says that the original colors of M&M’s were red, yellow, violet, green and orange.
I remember that commercial from when I was a kid – when I read your first comment I was sort of excited to find that they had just become colored then. Boo, KN, for ruining a great story with ugly facts! ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%26M%27s#Color_changes_in_chocolate_M&M's
I saw the Wikipedia article, but of course I only believe them when they agree with me. So I wrote to the company.
Wow! You really feel passionate about this M&M color issue!
http://adage.com/article/rewind/1954-ad-shows-m-ms-characters-a-chocolatey-swim/241375/
The swimming pool commercial.
Well, that’s a different swimming commercial than the one that would have run in the 80s (it had multiple M&Ms of both varieties swimming, and showering), but the person who wrote the article seems to be remembering the same one I did…heh. (Also, sorry, Chak, for mixing you up with a different poster.)
@ Wendy – PBF is an independent webcomic: there’s no syndicated colorization, it’s all home grown.
“when I was a child the M&Ms were all chocolate brown.”
Certain rumors about green M&Ms were well-established by the time I was old enough to become aware of them.
I think one reason this cartoon is tricky to understand is because the last panel contains information necessary to understand the backstory concerning the warring factions. So it takes some study of the last panel (as well as the first) to properly get a sense of the imaginary world.
However, the last panel also contains the punchline, but the punchline doesn’t make much sense until you first understand the backstory of this fantastical world.
So this cartoon pretty much requires multiple readings, even if you have a sense of what the cartoonist is trying to “get” at.
I had no trouble understanding this one, and I think one of the reasons is that, if I see a yellow egg-shaped thing with arms, legs, and a face on it, in a candy-related context, I immediately think of J. K. Simmons’s Peanut M&M character, which he’s been playing for over twenty years. So it never occurred to me that Colonel Sweeto could have been anything OTHER than a peanut M&M. Thus, I immediately thought that he consisted of a peanut, surrounded by chocolate, surrounded by a yellow candy coating. So the moment that it was said, in the first panel, that chocolate candies and hard candies were at war, it became obvious that M&Ms could be undercover agents for the Chocolates.
But I think that if you don’t have the immediate association between an ovoid yellow candy with humanoid features and Yellow M&M, it would be harder to figure out.
If someone isn’t familiar with the look of the M&Ms spokescandies, Wikipedia provides the following image, which might explain why I immediately associated Colonel Sweeto with Yellow Peanut M&M:
Heh – it’s easy to be interested when all you have to do is send an email.
Okay, if anybody is still interested (or even if no one is), I talked to a Mars rep this morning, and as usual, my memory is half right, and half-arsed.
He said that the plain M&Ms have always been multicolored, but the peanut ones were all chocolate brown when they first came out.
So I am imagining remembering all-brown plain ones, but I’m not alone there. My sister also remembers them that way.
Small aside: when I emailed the company, I used my nom-de-plume, Chak Olate. I have to hand it to the rep, he didn’t even pause when I told him that was my name. hehe
As a very young children, my sister and I had Smarties or Bonitos (better because of the smile faces); my mother loved peanuts, so she had Treets but not us because “children choke on peanuts”.
Chak: Have to give KN credit: She correctly predicted at the start that you were thinking of the peanut ones.
Those collective false memories are hard to shake. I still feel sure that it’s spelled “Berenstein Bears.” :)
Olivier: When I was young, my best friend’s mother was driving a bunch of kids home, and gave them all some Smarties, which they had never had before. The kids went home, and told their parents how my friend’s mom was so great, because she had given them all pills. Hilarity ensued.
Yup, kudos to KN!