The chronology and plot seem to be beyond me. There’s a panel marked “Yesterday” — when do we see any other time? Do the two extras at the top (bird & worm, and invisible ink) stand alone, or do they play into the main plot?
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I don’t think the top panels have anything to do with the rest of the strip. The chronology problem could have been fixed with a “Today”, probably in the last panel. As I see it, Horace has made a donation and earned a halo. He’s embarrassed by it and tries to get away from it. Finally, he tosses a brick through a window (most likely onto some fragile display items) and winds up in jail. But the halo’s gone, so that’s a relief.
The top intro panel(s) usually don’t have anything to do with the rest of the strip. The infinite variations therein continue to amaze and entertain me. Sometimes they take a bit of time to “get” them. Often there is an elevator involved.
//He earned a halo and wanted to get rid of it. He tried various ways to do so. When he chanced to trip over a brick, he had an idea and took the handy solution. He committed the crime of breaking a store window. Problem solved. Question: is it funny now if you didn’t get it the first time?
DemetriosX and $Bill have it @1&2. I don’t think this strip needs a “today”, but the place to put it would have been on the second panel in the second row. After Horace discovered the brick, I was expecting (or at least hoping for) a “Krazy Kat” reference in the shop window. I was also amused by the upside-down box (which must have been taped wrong, or not at all). As for the “throwaway” panels in the top row, if Horace can’t find his ink, he could try borrowing some from today’s “Mutts“:
Ummmkay…but what’s with the box? How does it relate to anything??
P.S. Only after I saw that Mutts strip appear here did I notice that it was hand-lettered. It appears that McDonnell has reverted to hand lettering for all of the daily strips since October 10th. It would be really nice if he keeps it that way; the way he used his computer font torpedoed a lot of the charm in the strip. He may have done the same for the Sunday strips, but they have a longer lead time, and none have appeared so far.
@ phsiiicidu – The box is just another attempt to escape from the halo, so its orientation is irrelevant. I was merely amused that Samson bothered to include the classic side icons, but then decided to make them inverted.
So tripping over the brick wasn’t exactly a punishment, but just an accident? With the story function of making him aware of the brick, leading to the defiant toss of the brick?
I thought of “invisible ink” in the wrong way, I guess. I was thinking of it as showing at first, then fading to invisibility. That would be a naughty way of taking credit for writing a generous donation check, but not having it paid out when eventually presented to the bank.
@ Mitch – That’s the way I see it: just an opportunity to divest his halo.
Re: MUTTS. In the October newsletter I rec’d a few days ago, he mentions that he is reverting to hand-lettering his strips.
There’s a short story I can’t remember enough about to find (circa 1940s-1950s), where an angel is supposed to give a halo to a living saint, but it winds up going to the wrong person. The story is about the newly made saint trying to cope with walking around in the “modern” world with a halo. Much like the horse, he turns to sinning to try to get rid of it. However, as he is now a living saint, all his actions are saintly, so any attempted misdeed actually turns out to be helping the person he was trying to harm.
P.S. My first thought was that it’s an Anthony Boucher story, as it fits his style, but going through his bibliography, I don’t see it.
@ Mitch – I think the ink he was looking for was the kind that is “unseen” in some of the old Tom & Jerry or Warner Bros. cartoons, which can turn the “inked” person invisible. Horace wanted to erase either the bird, or his own open mouth, so that he wouldn’t have been “fed” right after the first panel.
P.P.S. Larson once wrote that his original caption was something like “Look, but don’t touch, or its mother will throw it out.“, but he changed it to the text shown above just before the submission deadline.
Divad, your story summary made me think of Thorne Smith (though the dates would be off). But nothing rings a bell in the Wikipedia page of his work.
The two top panels are indeed enigmatic. Napping in a hammock is done in the afternoon, thus the bird with the worm is not at all early. And of course he can’t find his invisible ink, it’s invisible! Not sure what either of these has to do with the rest of the strip.
@ SMB – Most Sunday strips include optional panels that are only printed if the newspaper decides to offer that strip the extra space. Since the artist cannot depend on whether they will be seen, they cannot include any crucial plot details, and are therefore usually used for a separate “throwaway” jokes. Here’s a classic example:
P.S. Watterson later wrote that he liked the “throwaway” joke in the second panel better than the rest of the strip.
This looks like an acid trip.
David: I think the story you’re recalling is “The Misguided Halo” by Henry Kuttner:
Not a factor in this specific cartoon, but making a donation to almost anything puts you on a dozen mailing lists — a slight downside to a visible halo. I ignore appeals from groups I don’t already support, although I feel guilty when they include cheap tote bags.
@Shrug, I was thinking about Mervyn Peake just this week, as I wanted to defend the Titus books during a break from official class time on Zoom, but didn’t get a chance. I have never been aware of his writings apart from that series.
There’s an excellent actress named Maxine Peake, and I for no good reason thought she must be a descendant or collateral relation of Mervyn Peake. But neither IMDB nor Wikipedia give any support to that idea.
A very recent (published this year) and highly-regarded novel, “The Hacienda” by Isabel Cañas, has the same timeline problem. Here are chapter titles:
Andrés. Hacienda San Isidro. Noviembre 1823
Beatriz. Septiembre 1823. Two Months Earlier
Andrés. Apan. Diciembre 1820. Three Years Earlier.
Beatriz. Present Day.
What the heck is “Present Day”? Octubre 2022? That doesn’t make sense because Beatriz would be 220 years old. Noviembre 1823 is the most recent “present day” in the book but Chapter 1 is Andrés looking back at the end, apparently after all the bad things happened to Beatriz throughout the rest of the book. In fact after Andrés’ backstory in Chapter 5, we are back to the narration of chapters 2, 3 and 4, so why not just say Septiembre 1823?
Not a factor in this specific cartoon, but making a donation to almost anything puts you on a dozen mailing lists — a slight downside to a visible halo.
Some years back I established a Donor Advised Fund. That was to lump several years of contributions before the update in the tax laws and personal change of circumstance meant I wouldn’t be able to deduct the donations.
Also it’s an easy way to donate appreciate shares of ETFs and avoid the capital gains. A side-effect is that you can control your visibility, from full disclosure to anonymous.
Shrug, the Kuttner is it. I knew I read it in an anthology of a single author’s work. I forgot about his, and I’ve probably read it three times.
And now that you’ve seen through my clever alias and revealed my true identity to the world, I will have to change again.
And as WordPress knows me by yet another name, it changed my name automatically before I noticed.
Divad
I know a David who pronounces it Dah-VEED. And his family is African American, not Israeli nor French.
I’m sure more than one model builder had stuck a clipping of that Calvin & Hobbes strip to their fridge.
As far as the Horse strip goes, I see the two throwaway panels as unrelated to one another. While the “Yesterday” caption didn’t throw me at first, looking at it again, it might indeed seem unnecessary.
As an aside, is prison a recurring situation for Horace along with his elevators and counting sheep?
And as a further aside, there’s something really weird going on with that Far Side baby carriage.
Why did wordpress delete the chapter numbers? Let me try again.
Chapter one. Andrés. Hacienda San Isidro. Noviembre 1823
Chapters two, three and four. Beatriz. Septiembre 1823. Two Months Earlier
Chapter five. Andrés. Apan. Diciembre 1820. Three Years Earlier.
Chapter six. Beatriz. Present Day.
If you wrote them as arabic numeral digits at the beginnings of lines, it probably took you as intending to make an HTML numbered list. It’s a part of this Theme that it has CSS formatting on HTML lists which removes the numbering (and removes indenting for nested lists). We mostly see the effects of that in connection with the idea of getting numbered comments in threads — WP core engine generates those as HTML ordered (numbered) lists, and then CSS from the Theme strips them down.
We know the CSS that could be used to “correct” that [it would have other side effects so cannot be assumed to be a correction pure and simple] but do not have the kind of Plan that would allow “drop in additional CSS”.
And besides the workaround you came up with of writing it out with a word ahead of the numbers, another trick would be to NOT indent the numbered lines
1 Andrés. Hacienda San Isidro. Noviembre 1823
2, 3, 4. Beatriz. Septiembre 1823. Two Months Earlier
5. Andrés. Apan. Diciembre 1820. Three Years Earlier.
6. Beatriz. Present Day.
What the heck is “Present Day”? Octubre 2022? That doesn’t make sense because Beatriz would be 220 years old. Noviembre 1823 is the most recent “present day” in the book but Chapter 1 is Andrés looking back at the end, apparently after all the bad things happened to Beatriz throughout the rest of the book. In fact after Andrés’ backstory in Chapter 5, we are back to the narration of chapters 2, 3 and 4, so why not just say Septiembre 1823?
Minor Annoyance – Over the decades I have donated “stuff” to both the Salvation Army and Goodwill. Never had to give any info to either to get a receipt for what was donated. (The Goodwill near us which closed is still closed (unrelated to the pandemic – back about 6 years ago now I went to donate things and they were closed) – but they have reopened their donation center – though the days/times they are open per their website is incorrect.
Other places I have sent a SMALL donation when someone has passed away in their honor and I continue to get donation requests decades later – I figure that the maybe $5 I sent to them decades ago to be a waste whe one take int account what they have since spent soliciting me for more donations as same puts them at a rather large net loss on my transaction.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I don’t think the top panels have anything to do with the rest of the strip. The chronology problem could have been fixed with a “Today”, probably in the last panel. As I see it, Horace has made a donation and earned a halo. He’s embarrassed by it and tries to get away from it. Finally, he tosses a brick through a window (most likely onto some fragile display items) and winds up in jail. But the halo’s gone, so that’s a relief.
The top intro panel(s) usually don’t have anything to do with the rest of the strip. The infinite variations therein continue to amaze and entertain me. Sometimes they take a bit of time to “get” them. Often there is an elevator involved.
//He earned a halo and wanted to get rid of it. He tried various ways to do so. When he chanced to trip over a brick, he had an idea and took the handy solution. He committed the crime of breaking a store window. Problem solved. Question: is it funny now if you didn’t get it the first time?
DemetriosX and $Bill have it @1&2. I don’t think this strip needs a “today”, but the place to put it would have been on the second panel in the second row. After Horace discovered the brick, I was expecting (or at least hoping for) a “Krazy Kat” reference in the shop window. I was also amused by the upside-down box (which must have been taped wrong, or not at all). As for the “throwaway” panels in the top row, if Horace can’t find his ink, he could try borrowing some from today’s “Mutts“:
Ummmkay…but what’s with the box? How does it relate to anything??
P.S. Only after I saw that Mutts strip appear here did I notice that it was hand-lettered. It appears that McDonnell has reverted to hand lettering for all of the daily strips since October 10th. It would be really nice if he keeps it that way; the way he used his computer font torpedoed a lot of the charm in the strip. He may have done the same for the Sunday strips, but they have a longer lead time, and none have appeared so far.
@ phsiiicidu – The box is just another attempt to escape from the halo, so its orientation is irrelevant. I was merely amused that Samson bothered to include the classic side icons, but then decided to make them inverted.
So tripping over the brick wasn’t exactly a punishment, but just an accident? With the story function of making him aware of the brick, leading to the defiant toss of the brick?
I thought of “invisible ink” in the wrong way, I guess. I was thinking of it as showing at first, then fading to invisibility. That would be a naughty way of taking credit for writing a generous donation check, but not having it paid out when eventually presented to the bank.
@ Mitch – That’s the way I see it: just an opportunity to divest his halo.
Re: MUTTS. In the October newsletter I rec’d a few days ago, he mentions that he is reverting to hand-lettering his strips.
There’s a short story I can’t remember enough about to find (circa 1940s-1950s), where an angel is supposed to give a halo to a living saint, but it winds up going to the wrong person. The story is about the newly made saint trying to cope with walking around in the “modern” world with a halo. Much like the horse, he turns to sinning to try to get rid of it. However, as he is now a living saint, all his actions are saintly, so any attempted misdeed actually turns out to be helping the person he was trying to harm.
P.S. My first thought was that it’s an Anthony Boucher story, as it fits his style, but going through his bibliography, I don’t see it.
@ Mitch – I think the ink he was looking for was the kind that is “unseen” in some of the old Tom & Jerry or Warner Bros. cartoons, which can turn the “inked” person invisible. Horace wanted to erase either the bird, or his own open mouth, so that he wouldn’t have been “fed” right after the first panel.
P.S. Speaking of feeding:
P.P.S. Larson once wrote that his original caption was something like “Look, but don’t touch, or its mother will throw it out.“, but he changed it to the text shown above just before the submission deadline.
Divad, your story summary made me think of Thorne Smith (though the dates would be off). But nothing rings a bell in the Wikipedia page of his work.
The two top panels are indeed enigmatic. Napping in a hammock is done in the afternoon, thus the bird with the worm is not at all early. And of course he can’t find his invisible ink, it’s invisible! Not sure what either of these has to do with the rest of the strip.
@ SMB – Most Sunday strips include optional panels that are only printed if the newspaper decides to offer that strip the extra space. Since the artist cannot depend on whether they will be seen, they cannot include any crucial plot details, and are therefore usually used for a separate “throwaway” jokes. Here’s a classic example:
P.S. Watterson later wrote that he liked the “throwaway” joke in the second panel better than the rest of the strip.
This looks like an acid trip.
David: I think the story you’re recalling is “The Misguided Halo” by Henry Kuttner:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?52299
A novel on much the same theme is MR. PYE, by Mervyn Peake (angel’s wings rather than halo, though):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Pye
Er, “Divad,” not “David.” Sorry.
Not a factor in this specific cartoon, but making a donation to almost anything puts you on a dozen mailing lists — a slight downside to a visible halo. I ignore appeals from groups I don’t already support, although I feel guilty when they include cheap tote bags.
The short story discussion brings to mind this:
https://www.misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics775.html
@Shrug, I was thinking about Mervyn Peake just this week, as I wanted to defend the Titus books during a break from official class time on Zoom, but didn’t get a chance. I have never been aware of his writings apart from that series.
There’s an excellent actress named Maxine Peake, and I for no good reason thought she must be a descendant or collateral relation of Mervyn Peake. But neither IMDB nor Wikipedia give any support to that idea.
A very recent (published this year) and highly-regarded novel, “The Hacienda” by Isabel Cañas, has the same timeline problem. Here are chapter titles:
Andrés. Hacienda San Isidro. Noviembre 1823
Beatriz. Septiembre 1823. Two Months Earlier
Andrés. Apan. Diciembre 1820. Three Years Earlier.
Beatriz. Present Day.
What the heck is “Present Day”? Octubre 2022? That doesn’t make sense because Beatriz would be 220 years old. Noviembre 1823 is the most recent “present day” in the book but Chapter 1 is Andrés looking back at the end, apparently after all the bad things happened to Beatriz throughout the rest of the book. In fact after Andrés’ backstory in Chapter 5, we are back to the narration of chapters 2, 3 and 4, so why not just say Septiembre 1823?
Not a factor in this specific cartoon, but making a donation to almost anything puts you on a dozen mailing lists — a slight downside to a visible halo.
Some years back I established a Donor Advised Fund. That was to lump several years of contributions before the update in the tax laws and personal change of circumstance meant I wouldn’t be able to deduct the donations.
Also it’s an easy way to donate appreciate shares of ETFs and avoid the capital gains. A side-effect is that you can control your visibility, from full disclosure to anonymous.
Shrug, the Kuttner is it. I knew I read it in an anthology of a single author’s work. I forgot about his, and I’ve probably read it three times.
And now that you’ve seen through my clever alias and revealed my true identity to the world, I will have to change again.
And as WordPress knows me by yet another name, it changed my name automatically before I noticed.
Divad
I know a David who pronounces it Dah-VEED. And his family is African American, not Israeli nor French.
I’m sure more than one model builder had stuck a clipping of that Calvin & Hobbes strip to their fridge.
As far as the Horse strip goes, I see the two throwaway panels as unrelated to one another. While the “Yesterday” caption didn’t throw me at first, looking at it again, it might indeed seem unnecessary.
As an aside, is prison a recurring situation for Horace along with his elevators and counting sheep?
And as a further aside, there’s something really weird going on with that Far Side baby carriage.
Why did wordpress delete the chapter numbers? Let me try again.
Chapter one. Andrés. Hacienda San Isidro. Noviembre 1823
Chapters two, three and four. Beatriz. Septiembre 1823. Two Months Earlier
Chapter five. Andrés. Apan. Diciembre 1820. Three Years Earlier.
Chapter six. Beatriz. Present Day.
If you wrote them as arabic numeral digits at the beginnings of lines, it probably took you as intending to make an HTML numbered list. It’s a part of this Theme that it has CSS formatting on HTML lists which removes the numbering (and removes indenting for nested lists). We mostly see the effects of that in connection with the idea of getting numbered comments in threads — WP core engine generates those as HTML ordered (numbered) lists, and then CSS from the Theme strips them down.
We know the CSS that could be used to “correct” that [it would have other side effects so cannot be assumed to be a correction pure and simple] but do not have the kind of Plan that would allow “drop in additional CSS”.
And besides the workaround you came up with of writing it out with a word ahead of the numbers, another trick would be to NOT indent the numbered lines
1 Andrés. Hacienda San Isidro. Noviembre 1823
2, 3, 4. Beatriz. Septiembre 1823. Two Months Earlier
5. Andrés. Apan. Diciembre 1820. Three Years Earlier.
6. Beatriz. Present Day.
What the heck is “Present Day”? Octubre 2022? That doesn’t make sense because Beatriz would be 220 years old. Noviembre 1823 is the most recent “present day” in the book but Chapter 1 is Andrés looking back at the end, apparently after all the bad things happened to Beatriz throughout the rest of the book. In fact after Andrés’ backstory in Chapter 5, we are back to the narration of chapters 2, 3 and 4, so why not just say Septiembre 1823?
Minor Annoyance – Over the decades I have donated “stuff” to both the Salvation Army and Goodwill. Never had to give any info to either to get a receipt for what was donated. (The Goodwill near us which closed is still closed (unrelated to the pandemic – back about 6 years ago now I went to donate things and they were closed) – but they have reopened their donation center – though the days/times they are open per their website is incorrect.
Other places I have sent a SMALL donation when someone has passed away in their honor and I continue to get donation requests decades later – I figure that the maybe $5 I sent to them decades ago to be a waste whe one take int account what they have since spent soliciting me for more donations as same puts them at a rather large net loss on my transaction.