There’s actually an explanation for this, left as an exercise for the community (but to also be revealed in comments, eventually).
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I think the explanation is approximately the same as in this exchange written by Mark Twain:
Becky: “…you’re Thomas Sawyer?” Tom: “That’s the name they lick me by. I’m ‘Tom’ when I’m good.“
P.S. The origin of the riddle appears to be a data transmission and/or scanning failure. The Arcamax feed shows only the final panel of the May 1st strip (and only the first panel of the May 2nd strip). I don’t know whether these errors affected Comics Kingdom (if so, both strips have since been corrected). Since CK image URLs do not embed here, click on that CK-link to read the whole strip.
P.P.S. Can anyone translate the Cyrillic epithets in the page header for “Zits” on the CK website?
I guess I don’t understand – what the problem is…
This is the final panel of a 3-panel strip. So of course the dialog seems a little unprepared.
Or are you saying it appeared this way somewhere? On its own, as though that were all of it? And without apology and correction?
@ Dana K – Precisely. See the Arcamax links in my comment @2, above.
So, he’s starting out with “… I do?”. Could this mean that this follows some sort of talk about WEDDING VOWS? And he’s confirming that he sort of knows what the lines are..
Did his mother call him, using his full name, and he said what the – did I do, which explains the dots?
Best I could do.
Kilby, дурак = fool; козел (no umlaut in Russian!!) = goat; чудо (again, no diacritic) = miracle
Here’s a link to the entire graphic:
P.S. My Russian is very weak, comprising two years of technical Russian about 40 years ago; however, I remember the alphabet, and Google Translate lets you enter the phonetic versions and then says “Did you mean?” so you can match it to the letters you’re trying to translate. It’s a great cheat.
Ok, that is the graphic, not a link to it. I pasted the link, which was api.kingdigital.com/img/features/642/Zits_qs.20160228.png with the requisite https prefix and WordPress did its thing.
And…I’m wrong about diacritics:
In the Russian language there are two diacritical signs: sign [ ˘ ] which is found only above the letter й, and sign [ ¨ ] which is put only above the letter ё. But that’s still “goat”.
And the one shown over the у is still wrong, I dank.
Using someone’s first, middle and last name is usually followed by either “I do” (wedding vows) or that person is about to get berated for whatever they did wrong.
Likely his mom just used all three names. Probably with an angry tone. He pauses, unsure how to respond. Hoping for the former, he says, “I do.” His friend knows it is the latter.
Thanks to @ phsiiicidu for the translations and the link. Unfortunately that URL only contains the “header” stuff for ZITS, so for everyone else: please, before you express additional puzzlement about the single panel shown at the top of this post, read the full strip at Comics Kingdom, or click on this link to the image (which cannot be embedded here, because it uses a PHP script to retrieve the file).
so for everyone else: please, before you express additional puzzlement about the single panel shown at the top of this post, read the full strip at Comics Kingdom,
I don’t see people expressing puzzlement, I see people ENJOYING THE GAME. We’re creatively speculating on what the previous panels could have been to lead to the one that is shown. Eventually the editors, or some commenter, indeed should post the original full strip. But don’t you think this is a bit early for that?
On that path, I agree with TedD that someone has addressed him by all three names; and since that is maybe a stronger female than male pattern, let’s say either the mother or girlfriend.
Now, how does the ellipsis run-in and “I do” fit with that? Can we still take it as wedding vows? Maybe “Jeremy Middle Duncan, don’t pretend you don’t know the response at your wedding!”
Though I also like Maggie’s suggested reconstruction, which does not need the whole wedding-vows theory.
Danny says “Though I also like Maggie’s suggested reconstruction, which does not need the whole wedding-vows theory.” I’ll salute to that! But I’m not clear on whether the “What the hck did …” would be shown in a previous panel, or there is some other/more context there and “What the hck did …” is not literally shown but is what we understand the dots are implying is omitted.
I’m remembering some show from years ago where two little boys are talking. One says he doesn’t have a middle name, and the other says, “Then how do you know when your mommy’s mad at you?”
As far as I see it, the only thing not to understand is how an experienced syndicate could manage to ship just one panel and not the whole strip (and they did it at least twice). I already linked the full strip (see @2), but for those of you who enjoy the artificiality of excerpting a CIDU panel out of a clearly non-CIDU strip, go ahead.
You don’t see it as like a Caption Contest?
@ deety – Honestly, not really. I thought that Phil’s “excercise” was simply to explain how this “single panel” comic came into existence. I do agree that Jeremy’s “…I Do” remark leads to a marital red herring: that was what I first thought, before I found the complete strip.
While inventing a new caption for a captionless drawing can be entertaining and productive (witness the New Yorker’s long-running contest), in this case it seems like trying to reconstruct an existing, available answer from insufficient data.
Okay, probably enough time has passed, and we should embed-post the full strip.
So — a “no” to wedding vow context for “I do”; but a “yes” to Sara using his three names; and a “no” to us finding out exactly what his misbehavior was. Also apparently a “no” to learning just what went wrong at ArcaMax.
Using someone’s first, middle and last name is usually followed by either “I do” (wedding vows) or that person is about to get berated for whatever they did wrong.
Or, in an obituary, followed by “was born…” As in “Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born in Orillia, Ontario, on Nov. 17, 1938.”
There’s a trick that writers of comic-book versions of biographies use in order to introduce the full name of the subject. Where an ordinary biography might start out “Francis Vincent Zappa was born on …”, the comic book version opens with Frank’s mother saying “Francis Vincent Zappa! You put that down right now!”
And I’ve seen several appreciations of Gordon Lightfoot today!
@ Mitch – I saw a picture of Lightfoot in a German news feed that seemed positively spooky:
P.S. OK, in that size it’s not so bad, but at full resolution it was a bit of a shock.
Supposedly, all good things come in threes (see Arcamax):
Sara calls him “Jeremy Duane” but Wikipedia cites an earlier strip where Connie calls him “Jeremy Michael”.
She wants Walt to bring her stockings, which would somehow help delay Jeremy’s fermentation?
@ Dana K – I’m not sure whether that question was rhetorical, sarcastic, or serious, but that’s an outdoor window. In the first panel, she complains about the smell, and in the second there are flies buzzing about Jeremy’s head. The only question is how she intends to hose him down without flooding the house.
Except, I was working off of the single panel that we saw!
I went to a wedding where the groom was a guy named Jesse Long. You know how parents sometimes give a kid the last name of some relative or other, so you get John Vandersnoot Smith or Fred Tyler Jones? The family name Jesse got was “Hardin”. So when the minister said, “Do you, Jesse Hardin Long, …” there was much merriment.
@ Dana K – That’s what I suspected, but I did provide a link to the full strip below that panel.
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).
So, all of these have been part of a continuing story — though it may not have been clear from the truncated strips as posted.
Now it looks like that story may have drawn to a close:
A year or so before Robert and I started dating I won tickets to see Gordon Lightfoot at the Vivan Beaumont Theater. It was such a memorable concert that it started playing in my head when I read that he had died. (The before Robert part is because instead of having to drag him to see it – I went with my sister – our different tastes in music are among the few differences in our opinions.)
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think the explanation is approximately the same as in this exchange written by Mark Twain:
Becky: “…you’re Thomas Sawyer?”
Tom: “That’s the name they lick me by. I’m ‘Tom’ when I’m good.“
P.S. The origin of the riddle appears to be a data transmission and/or scanning failure. The Arcamax feed shows only the final panel of the May 1st strip (and only the first panel of the May 2nd strip). I don’t know whether these errors affected Comics Kingdom (if so, both strips have since been corrected). Since CK image URLs do not embed here, click on that CK-link to read the whole strip.
P.P.S. Can anyone translate the Cyrillic epithets in the page header for “Zits” on the CK website?
I guess I don’t understand – what the problem is…
This is the final panel of a 3-panel strip. So of course the dialog seems a little unprepared.
Or are you saying it appeared this way somewhere? On its own, as though that were all of it? And without apology and correction?
@ Dana K – Precisely. See the Arcamax links in my comment @2, above.
So, he’s starting out with “… I do?”. Could this mean that this follows some sort of talk about WEDDING VOWS? And he’s confirming that he sort of knows what the lines are..
Did his mother call him, using his full name, and he said what the – did I do, which explains the dots?
Best I could do.
Kilby, дурак = fool; козел (no umlaut in Russian!!) = goat; чудо (again, no diacritic) = miracle
Here’s a link to the entire graphic:
P.S. My Russian is very weak, comprising two years of technical Russian about 40 years ago; however, I remember the alphabet, and Google Translate lets you enter the phonetic versions and then says “Did you mean?” so you can match it to the letters you’re trying to translate. It’s a great cheat.
Ok, that is the graphic, not a link to it. I pasted the link, which was api.kingdigital.com/img/features/642/Zits_qs.20160228.png with the requisite https prefix and WordPress did its thing.
And…I’m wrong about diacritics:
In the Russian language there are two diacritical signs: sign [ ˘ ] which is found only above the letter й, and sign [ ¨ ] which is put only above the letter ё. But that’s still “goat”.
And the one shown over the у is still wrong, I dank.
Using someone’s first, middle and last name is usually followed by either “I do” (wedding vows) or that person is about to get berated for whatever they did wrong.
Likely his mom just used all three names. Probably with an angry tone. He pauses, unsure how to respond. Hoping for the former, he says, “I do.” His friend knows it is the latter.
Thanks to @ phsiiicidu for the translations and the link. Unfortunately that URL only contains the “header” stuff for ZITS, so for everyone else: please, before you express additional puzzlement about the single panel shown at the top of this post, read the full strip at Comics Kingdom, or click on this link to the image (which cannot be embedded here, because it uses a PHP script to retrieve the file).
so for everyone else: please, before you express additional puzzlement about the single panel shown at the top of this post, read the full strip at Comics Kingdom,I don’t see people expressing puzzlement, I see people ENJOYING THE GAME. We’re creatively speculating on what the previous panels could have been to lead to the one that is shown. Eventually the editors, or some commenter, indeed should post the original full strip. But don’t you think this is a bit early for that?
On that path, I agree with TedD that someone has addressed him by all three names; and since that is maybe a stronger female than male pattern, let’s say either the mother or girlfriend.
Now, how does the ellipsis run-in and “I do” fit with that? Can we still take it as wedding vows? Maybe “Jeremy Middle Duncan, don’t pretend you don’t know the response at your wedding!”
Though I also like Maggie’s suggested reconstruction, which does not need the whole wedding-vows theory.
Danny says “Though I also like Maggie’s suggested reconstruction, which does not need the whole wedding-vows theory.” I’ll salute to that! But I’m not clear on whether the “What the hck did …” would be shown in a previous panel, or there is some other/more context there and “What the hck did …” is not literally shown but is what we understand the dots are implying is omitted.
I’m remembering some show from years ago where two little boys are talking. One says he doesn’t have a middle name, and the other says, “Then how do you know when your mommy’s mad at you?”
As far as I see it, the only thing not to understand is how an experienced syndicate could manage to ship just one panel and not the whole strip (and they did it at least twice). I already linked the full strip (see @2), but for those of you who enjoy the artificiality of excerpting a CIDU panel out of a clearly non-CIDU strip, go ahead.
You don’t see it as like a Caption Contest?
@ deety – Honestly, not really. I thought that Phil’s “excercise” was simply to explain how this “single panel” comic came into existence. I do agree that Jeremy’s “…I Do” remark leads to a marital red herring: that was what I first thought, before I found the complete strip.
While inventing a new caption for a captionless drawing can be entertaining and productive (witness the New Yorker’s long-running contest), in this case it seems like trying to reconstruct an existing, available answer from insufficient data.
Okay, probably enough time has passed, and we should embed-post the full strip.
So — a “no” to wedding vow context for “I do”; but a “yes” to Sara using his three names; and a “no” to us finding out exactly what his misbehavior was. Also apparently a “no” to learning just what went wrong at ArcaMax.
Using someone’s first, middle and last name is usually followed by either “I do” (wedding vows) or that person is about to get berated for whatever they did wrong.
Or, in an obituary, followed by “was born…” As in “Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born in Orillia, Ontario, on Nov. 17, 1938.”
There’s a trick that writers of comic-book versions of biographies use in order to introduce the full name of the subject. Where an ordinary biography might start out “Francis Vincent Zappa was born on …”, the comic book version opens with Frank’s mother saying “Francis Vincent Zappa! You put that down right now!”
And I’ve seen several appreciations of Gordon Lightfoot today!
@ Mitch – I saw a picture of Lightfoot in a German news feed that seemed positively spooky:
P.S. OK, in that size it’s not so bad, but at full resolution it was a bit of a shock.
Supposedly, all good things come in threes (see Arcamax):
P.S. Or not. That is, of course, only the third panel of the full strip for May 3rd.
Sara calls him “Jeremy Duane” but Wikipedia cites an earlier strip where Connie calls him “Jeremy Michael”.
She wants Walt to bring her stockings, which would somehow help delay Jeremy’s fermentation?
@ Dana K – I’m not sure whether that question was rhetorical, sarcastic, or serious, but that’s an outdoor window. In the first panel, she complains about the smell, and in the second there are flies buzzing about Jeremy’s head. The only question is how she intends to hose him down without flooding the house.
Except, I was working off of the single panel that we saw!
I went to a wedding where the groom was a guy named Jesse Long. You know how parents sometimes give a kid the last name of some relative or other, so you get John Vandersnoot Smith or Fred Tyler Jones? The family name Jesse got was “Hardin”. So when the minister said, “Do you, Jesse Hardin Long, …” there was much merriment.
@ Dana K – That’s what I suspected, but I did provide a link to the full strip below that panel.
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!
So, all of these have been part of a continuing story — though it may not have been clear from the truncated strips as posted.
Now it looks like that story may have drawn to a close:
A year or so before Robert and I started dating I won tickets to see Gordon Lightfoot at the Vivan Beaumont Theater. It was such a memorable concert that it started playing in my head when I read that he had died. (The before Robert part is because instead of having to drag him to see it – I went with my sister – our different tastes in music are among the few differences in our opinions.)