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How did Keith Knight ever come up with the idea for this airline name?
@ Danny – Well, if you weren’t the one who suggested it, then perhaps Mr. Knight was looking for a name that would fit with the airline’s principles of “CYA”. Still, I would have thought that they would only fly to Ireland, and not to Brooklyn.
Derry-Air isn’t hip, but it is close.
Quite a collection:
Wonderful clip!
@ Grawlix – I agree with Mitch, but now I’m wondering what happened to the rest of all of those old newspaper archives. If it took six “semi” trucks to deliver just the comic pages that he clipped, the mass of paper that he did not save must have been truly enormous.
When I wrote that comment last night, it was longer but got lost in some accident of thumbs and iPad editing. So when I went to re-create it I just did the bare statement. I had tried to say I heard a radio report on the same topic, and of course the video clip was much more vivid. Not just in showing the materials, but in writing / reporting — like, those semis!
In addition to the fumbling mishandling that Arcamax has recently inflicted upon “Zits” and the Sunday “Macanudo” strips, yesterday they committed a one-time coloration assault upon “Mutts“:
There are two reasons that I read “Mutts” at Arcamax: first, McDonnell’s own website has become a marketing and propaganda emporium that makes it increasingly difficult just to browse recent strips. Second, I heartily dislike the retroactive coloration that Comics Kingdom imposes upon McDonnell’s simplistic artwork. Luckily, today’s Mutts strip at Arcamax shows that yesterday’s coloration was merely an isolated peculiarity:
CALL FOR HOLIDAY-THEMED CONTENT
Please help the editors assemble holiday-themed posts for MOTHERS’ DAY (Sunday 14 May) and MEMORIAL DAY (Monday 29 May).
All sorts of cartoon material is welcome!
Submit suggestions by email ( CIDU.Submissions@gmail.com ) or via our webform ( https://cidu.info/suggest-a-cidu/ ) .
Thanks!
Most strips are produced in black and white for the dailies. The syndicate then hires a third-party service for consumers that want color strips. I suspect that it isn’t CK exactly, but King Features. This is common also to GoComics, where the Andrews-McMeel/Universal strips are colored and then run on GC. A few exceptions are Breaking Cat News, where Georgia Dunn wasn’t satisfied and took over the daily coloring, and Lio, which appears only in B&W. I don’t know if that’s the case for newspapers.
@ Brian – Other exceptions include “Calvin & Hobbes” (Watterson would never allow a syndicate clone to fudge up his artwork) and the equally brilliant “Wallace the Brave”, for which Will Henry has been doing his own colored artwork since the very beginning (even before syndication). The oddity in that first “Mutts” strip shown above was simply that Arcamax grabbed the color version by mistake. The colors on “Fontella” were very well-done, but I still generally prefer McDonnell in monochrome, except for Sundays.
The problems at Arcamax are getting worse. Here is what Arcamax would like to believe is the entire Mutts strip for Sunday, March 7th, 2023:
P.S. That is of course just the throwaway “title” panel, the rest of the strip is nowhere to be found. The idiocy for March 6th was even worse: Arcamax archived, in this order: the complete strip in monochrome, then just the final panel in color, and then the complete strip in color. This is getting ridiculous: either Arcamax needs to get their act together, or I need to find a better place to read comics.
FYI
@ Mitch – Sad news, but on a more positive note, that was your 7000th comment since the CIDU website was rebooted in January, 2018.
Thanks for tracking, but if that count was from larK’s site it differs a little from WP’S internal :
But indeed a timely reminder to watch for the All to cross another round multiple!
P.s. From larK’s prolificity option, it seems you yourself are quickly closing in on that 7000, and witn Andrėa close behind.
@ Mitch – I made an oblique reference (near the end of page two of this thread) when I hit 6000, but it was far too obscure for anyone to notice.
The Nib recently posted an absolutely fascinating review of (former) the methods used to publish color comics, including detailed images and a fair amount of information about monochrome processes, too. My only complaint is that the article is too short.
P.P.S. Please ignore my word reversal and go read the article, it’s well worth the time!
That was really interesting!
An aspect they didn’t touch on much was the technicalities of four-color printing at the last steps. Have you ever seen the registration lines and crosses, and color strips, outside the actual production print area, used to check registration (alignment)?
There are odd effects when the registration is wrong. If you’re familiar currently with the Tik-Tok logo, that’s an example of doing a misalignment purposely (or keeping something that happened by mistake).
I wonder how Georgia Dunn does it for Breaking Cat News, both daily and Sunday. She does watercolors for both. Do they use some sort of color copying?
How do I find the Arlo page? I found it once and I can’t remember how I did it.
Maggie, the Arlo Page is at https://arlopage.wordpress.com/ . We aren’t managing it from CIDU (I don’t think anybody is). So it is basically read-only at this point — or commenting may still be live. But there is a good bit to read there.
Oh, I see. I wrote a comment and it was never moderated. Thanks Mitch!
@ Maggie – The CIDU editors received the access rights to the primary CIDU setup at WordPress from Bill’s family, but not to any of the “Arlo Page“, “Crimeweek“, or several earlier incarnations of Bill’s websites. I’m not even sure whether Robin or Aaron would (now) be able to find the login data for any of those setups.
The problem for you (and anyone else who is new) is that since most WordPress setups send the first comment to any new participant to “moderation”,† you will never be able to enter a comment on any of those other “CIDU-related” websites unless someone goes to the trouble of working through the moderation queue. Given that these websites have been untended for nearly three years, it is highly unlikely that this will ever happen.
The moral of the story is that EVERYONE should feel free to read, but don’t bother trying to comment on anything (especially since it is relatively unlikely that those comments would be read by anyone else).
P.S. † – Automatic moderation of every user’s first comment is a crucial protection against all sorts of random spam; Bill praised this feature on several occasions.
It happens that since Maggie’s question (and probably prompted by that),two readers have posted comments at the arlopage site — these are previously approved commenters, so these new comments from them did not get held up, and appeared on site “untouched by human hands” (as some very old ad campaign used to say).
@ Mitch – Good to know that those systems are still functional, but it’s worth warning all CIDU readers that since the server meltdown and URL change, the “Link Back” from the Arlo Page to CIDU still goes to the original CIDU URL, which is currently attached to an Indonesian gambling website. I still have no idea why those idiots thought it was worthwhile to buy the old CIDU URL.
Some more extremely sad news: Matt Bors has announced that “The Nib” will continue to publish (online) until the end of August, and will then cease active operations.
And some happy news: I was a little worried when I noticed that the BCN strips that Brian posted were over five years old, but I had forgotten that Georgia Dunn was taking a break for surgery. She has just announce that she is (slowly, carefully) returning to the drawing board, and that new BCN strips will appear in about a month, with Sunday strips following after another month.
The Sunday BCN strips haven’t gone into reruns yet, due to the longer lead time. So it’s been daily reruns and new Sundays since May 1. I think the plan is for new dailies to start this coming Monday.