I agree with Carl Fink that the Ballard Street (“Herschel”) is puzzling. The implicature of the way she says this is that he is not a real person – which raises issues of how she must be deluded since she is standing by him in person. So we could go off into tangents about how he might be an android or robot; but there is little basis for taking the cartoon that way.
But then, there is a different direction to go in … Both of them are fictional characters, existing only in the form of line drawings. So not “a real person”. And her implicature is then actually correct. In this view that includes the meta take.
I read the Herschel as “you never go anywhere, just sit and read the paper or watch tv, and most people think I made you up” in reverse
I know that I should be more charitable, seeing as it was so long ago, but having suffered through all those years of “The Neighborhood”, I would say that the most amazing mystery about “Ballard Street” is why it is still being published at all.
P.S. Pixar did a superb short film called “One Man Band” that shows two of them in a duel.
There’s a reasonable-ish tradition in the UK in TV & radio soaps and sitcoms for there to be characters frequently referred to in the dialogue who never make an actual appearance in the show.
And it was a big deal when a referred-to character might actually show up. I can recall two appearances on the JACK BENNY raiod show of “Mary Livingstone’s” sister Babe (who I think was Sadie Marx’s real sister, and who acquited herself well as a fill-in when “Mary” was sick) and a couple of instances on FIBBER MCGEE — Marge the telephone switchboard woman made a brief appearance on a “last show of the sequence” once to wish them a happy vacation (Fibber didn’t recognize her until she’d left) and Molly’s scapegrace “Uncle Dennis,” after months of living upstairs as an unseen character, started showing up as an irregular regular (and wasn’t at all funny).
I’m pretty sure Sabrina never appeared on the GOON SHOW, alas, though John Snagge did so at least once.
There was bunch in “Seinfeld”, notably Kramer’s friend Bob Sacamano.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Herschel is a CIDU for me.
This is the only Don Quijote comic you (or at least I) will ever need:
I use John Bunyan’s phrase, ‘slough of despond’.
I agree with Carl Fink that the Ballard Street (“Herschel”) is puzzling. The implicature of the way she says this is that he is not a real person – which raises issues of how she must be deluded since she is standing by him in person. So we could go off into tangents about how he might be an android or robot; but there is little basis for taking the cartoon that way.
But then, there is a different direction to go in … Both of them are fictional characters, existing only in the form of line drawings. So not “a real person”. And her implicature is then actually correct. In this view that includes the meta take.
I read the Herschel as “you never go anywhere, just sit and read the paper or watch tv, and most people think I made you up” in reverse
I know that I should be more charitable, seeing as it was so long ago, but having suffered through all those years of “The Neighborhood”, I would say that the most amazing mystery about “Ballard Street” is why it is still being published at all.
P.S. Pixar did a superb short film called “One Man Band” that shows two of them in a duel.
There’s a reasonable-ish tradition in the UK in TV & radio soaps and sitcoms for there to be characters frequently referred to in the dialogue who never make an actual appearance in the show.
And it was a big deal when a referred-to character might actually show up. I can recall two appearances on the JACK BENNY raiod show of “Mary Livingstone’s” sister Babe (who I think was Sadie Marx’s real sister, and who acquited herself well as a fill-in when “Mary” was sick) and a couple of instances on FIBBER MCGEE — Marge the telephone switchboard woman made a brief appearance on a “last show of the sequence” once to wish them a happy vacation (Fibber didn’t recognize her until she’d left) and Molly’s scapegrace “Uncle Dennis,” after months of living upstairs as an unseen character, started showing up as an irregular regular (and wasn’t at all funny).
I’m pretty sure Sabrina never appeared on the GOON SHOW, alas, though John Snagge did so at least once.
There was bunch in “Seinfeld”, notably Kramer’s friend Bob Sacamano.