As we have asked a few times before, Does this Bliss cartoon work better in b/w or in color?
(As we probably have not asked before, Would this comparison slider presentation work better in this side-by-side format or in a vertical division?)
Our own Zbicyclist mentions the resemblance of the b/w paintings above to some works his family saw on a visit to the Fundació Joan Miró (Museum) in Barcelona, which features work by Miró as well as other 20th and 21st Century artists. This shot from the #FundacióMiró Foundation’s Instagram shows a work which was also shown in Zbicyclist’s family visit photo; the dot in the museum is either black or a very dark blue.
But then, don’t you also think “Such peacefulness”?
Perhaps a bit CIDU-LOL?
And another food-centered cartoon (older – you may have seen before):
I can forgive mispelins in comic strips, but the sloppy editing in the regular news (and the sloppy headlines) depress me.
Andréa sends in this update about Mutts:
Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts has a new look: “MUTTS might look a little different to you this week and in the future. If so, it’s because I’ve loosened up my art style, using very little preliminary pencils (in some cases none) and going straight to drawing in ink. It gives the strip more of the power and intimacy of a preliminary sketch, which I love. I’m also freehand lettering the dialogue”
Refusal with very good reason! (Awarded Arlo)
And here is the effect of his overactive pineal:
Back to Bliss!
Comics I Don't Understand 
In the first Bliss cartoon, the default position of the slider line is between the second and third painting. At first glance, I asked myself, “Why is yellow more angry than white?” Of course, then I read on…
I’m afraid every single one of these is a CIDU.
Well, not every single one. The Panda one, the Mutts, and the Barney and Clyde are fairly straightforward.
As a certified pedant, I am very aware of misspellings/mis-grammaticals; I have to say that there are FEWER of such in comics than in any newspaper and, yes, books I read. A major misteak is the lay/lie issue, and no matter how many times it’s corrected in the comments (and not always by me, BTW), the unnamed comic artist STILL refuses to learn the difference.
Well, @Powers the Andertoons editorial label does say it’s in part maybe a CIDU. Here’s a clue for it: a Waldorf salad is made with Apples.
Yeah I googled that much. Is that all there is — they needed an apple for their salad?
I’ll wait for Targuman to show up and share some genuine scholarship on what the original language was and what the best translations have been, for the story of Adam and Eve and the temptation to eat of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But no matter the scholarship, “apple” has taken hold in the English-speaking popular versions of the story.
So the joke here is that Eve will not let Adam get away with “the woman that Thou gavest to me did tempt me with the [apple]” , instead pointing out that Adam’s taste for Waldorf Salad shows that he was just as much to blame.
@Powers, for the upper Bliss, the joke would be how much pretension this guy just casually gets away with, by reading in “anger” to these minimal dots. Even more so in the color version with those very cheery background fields.
Btw, at 6:02 today 10/23 it was Mole Day
Thank you for the shoutout! But you have it. Genesis doesn’t say what kind of fruit, but “Apple” has taken hold in English language (pomegranate in others). And so, the need for an apple to complete the Waldorf salad is the joke.
For a bit of “real” scholarship, when I teach Genesis, I always point out that it says, “she gave some to her man, who was with her, and he ate.” The “with her” is not in every English translation but it is there in the Hebrew and is key. It heavily suggests that the man was there when she ATE the fruit, even if he wasn’t there for the conversation with the serpent.
Thank you @Mitch4! I meant to put in the tag…
Adding to Mitch4’s explanation, IIRC, the “apple” incident resulted in God expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to fend for themselves in what turned out to be a rather cruel world. I think they are pictured here on their way out of Paradise (alternate name for Eden).
My mind went Arlo for the Adam and Eve cartoon. I was trying to figure out how the the “salad” being used to conceal their modesty tied in with him wanting nuts.
Yep, they’re on their way to a screening of “East of Eden”.
There is an idea that I heard that the forbidden fruit was the grape, not the apple. This explains one strange thing in the Old Testament: why the Nazirites, who dedicated themselves to God, were forbidden non only from strong drink, but even grapes and raisins.
There is at least one (I believe) Babylonian carving that shows the first couple standing under a grape vine.
And there’s more if you go deeper.
The hummingbird Bliss utterly escapes me.
The guy is so far gone on his trip that he sees himself as hummingbird size and holed up in a tree knot, and sees the hummingbird as a good potential messenger back to remembered elements of the real world. Like his wife, who may need his absence explained.
I enjoy Waldorf salad, so I got that one immediately. There is some familial disagreement about the proper composition of said salad. I prefer a fairly traditional approach, with just apples, celery, mayonnaise, and toasted pecans. Others want to add raisins and/or grapes.
I briefly wondered — before I remembered what a Waldorf salad is — if Adam had eaten his chest pasties, thus setting the precedent for all time that men can go bare-chested.
But then I remembered that Waldorf salads don’t contain fig leaves.
The Bliss reminds me of a cartoon from 50 years ago. I forget who drew it or where it was. There is a painting in an art museum that consists of a white canvas with a solid black circle in the exact center. The artist, looking at it, says “They hung my painting upside-down!”
But then I remembered that Waldorf salads don’t contain fig leaves.
Or really leaves of any sort, although it’s sometimes served on a lettuce leaf.
Get Smart in the 1960s had an episode set in a modern art gallery. Max confidently explain a painting to 99: “The three colors represent the great forces of nature. That little dot symbolizes the insignificance of mankind.” The little dot flies away, buzzing.
Flies are not only the bane of art; they interfere with music as well. https://youtu.be/xW_jT1GP5GI
I wasn’t familiar with that Spike Jones song.
Another use for modern art (New Yorker, Oct 1952, Anatol Kovarsky)
@ Zbicyclist – Once after seeing that comment for the third time did I notice the virtually invisible rectangular icon in the second line. The dropbox link was cumbersome, but it did (eventually) work.
I wasn’t able to find the “safe” comic, but I did discover another one of his “art” comics at the “New Yorker’s Conde Nast store:
Kilby said: “@ Zbicyclist – [Only] after seeing that comment for the third time did I notice the virtually invisible rectangular icon in the second line. The dropbox link was cumbersome, but it did (eventually) work.”
I couldn’t make sense of this at first, as I never saw that icon nor any Dropbox link, as Zbicyclist’s linked-in picture was all along displaying fine for me, in the regular WP browser format. Then I clicked on the image and saw Dropbox and a share message. (Though I had no reason to do that originally, as the image was there in the comment.)
I’ll embed it via Postimage here, for those who did not previously see it. This and Kilby’s selection from the same artist are indeed interesting!
Now that I have clicked on the link and shared the image, it displays “inline” under Zbicyclist’s comment, but only on this device. On our “other” iPad (with identical iOS), it still just shows the “placeholder” icon.
Could there be some difference in the way you are “signed in” to the browser, or to the device as a whole, in the two cases?
No, the sign-in is identical on both devices, as is the annoying 2/3rds of a line height allowed for the comment entry field (I wish you could revert whatever the change was that led to that). The only difference is that I never clicked on the dropbox link on the other iPad, so the browser has never bothered to fetch the image to that machine. The oddity only applies to Safari; when using Firefox, the image displays correctly on both machines, without clicking on any links.
We laugh about upside down… and then this appears: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63423811
@Dave in Boston: Well, I guess that breaks the previous Guinness world record for paintings displayed upside down. What was the previous one, Monet’s “Water Lilies”?
Here’s Tom Falco’s variation on that gallery:
It’s a lovely pun, but I can’t help thinking that he might have been able to multiply the humor by using a different (less common) punctuation mark (such as a “dollar sign” or “hash”).