Not quite the sharply-targeted (some might say mean) comic strip parodies Super-Fun-Pak Comix is in part known for, this linked sequence seems more like documenting and mildly kidding off some familiar tropes. Do you agree that there is something pretty artful in the selection, sequencing, and linking of the comic old-standards?
Comics I Don't Understand 
Uhhh, … okay, this is not about Target stores after all…
It works for me. To the extent that anything in Super Fun-Pak Comix ever really lands.
I think it’s pretty brilliant. I would certainly rather be eaten by cartoon cannibals than have Dilbert’s work environment.
Is the question addressing the stupid syndicate splitting up into individual strips what was clearly intended as one big strip and thereby ruining the effect for the most part? Or is it just questioning the tropes attacked?
I only saw this one here, where the editors have reassembled the parts, and I think it is clever, though I can’t help feeling there is still a missing payoff where the circle gets completed back to the desert isle, or at least the lack of a payoff is nodded to, and thus can’t help wishing I were seeing the whole complete original strip. (Maybe the “outside the box” comment indicates that the circle won’t be complete, and indeed it is a box, and we’re going outside it, is the payoff I’m looking for, but I can’t be sure without the complete strip — yes, I don’t like when they do this!)
larK, I’m not sure if you mean CIDU editors or GoComics editors. But I can tell you we didn’t do any clipping or pasting here — this vertical stack is the way it ran on GoComics, https://www.gocomics.com/super-fun-pak-comix/2021/06/03
But what I was having trouble expressing clearly in the write-up above was that SFPC does not regularly feature “Loopy Laffs”, or any of the others done here, the way it does keep coming back to “Marital Mirth” and always targeting “The Lockhorns”, by reducing its theme to invariant lowest terms, or one with a title I don’t recall that always targets “Dennis the Menace” . The targets here are just the familiar tropes/clichés of cartoon world — and not really trying to say something original about them but to have formal fun making each one comment on the next. (And as padraig notes, the kicker or last joke is that the unbearable fate that can’t be topped is picked out as office life.)
OK, misunderstanding on my part, I assumed you were getting st the cutting up a full comic to resell as individual the little bits, something which I disapprove of, and it seems to be clouding my perceptions — I thought each of these had been run individually, and you guys presented them as six or whatever individual comics linked by theme, but really just reuniting what should never have been separated. But it WASN’T separated, I see that now, my bad!
I agree with padraig, it is very clever that the office hell seems at first glance to be an anticlimax but then makes you think, Hmmm, maybe that is the worst — at any rate is the worst among these that any of us has a substantial chance of ending up in!
While the discussion started based on a misunderstanding, I’ll throw in my agreement that the GoComics policy of breaking up the Super-Fun-Pak (although not this one) into individual comics is a real bad one.
Note that the office people are about to be brutally punished for their clichés – arguably the worst fate of all. It’s a callback to the comic that ran several days previously on Go Comics, and yesterday on CIDU.
Thanks, Pete! I had subliminally registered the similarity of situation, but didn’t ever notice they are literally the same two guys!
… And indeed if they had managed to get “outside the box” they might have escaped the fate which was going to beFALL them!
Super Fun-Pak Comix are generally not split up into individual parts like this, so you do lose the context of both business cliche parts showing up together.
I was expecting the final one to loop back to the start.
Here is the original Tom the Dancing Bug from which these “comix” were extracted.
I see how the colorist avoided racial problems with the cannibal.
Was it here that I ran into a link about Jughead’s hat? The last strip in the above fun pak calls that to mind.
And I think having the callback to the businessmen strip at the end of the panels is important and exactly the kind of thing that gets lost when you cut this up…
I found it funny because the first three realize they are each in a comic cliche but the pair in the last don’t realize it, and likely that’s why it’s worst.
Or maybe it’s shameless pandering to the office worker demographic, who can all delightedly reflect that, yes, their lives really are worse than desert islands, torture in dungeons or cannibals. They’ll eventually age into being the Pluggers audience. That has to be funny, too, or it would be unbearably sad.
@ jajizi – The link you provided above has since expired, so here’s a replacement: