No, it’s not a CIDU (have you been sending in your candidates, eh?), but we couldn’t see confining this to a long LOL list, so here it is on its own!
(And Lay Lines fans may be in for a treat if recent favorites start appearing in the comments!)
The nicking knack
Comics I Don't Understand 
Her friends owned a bowling alley and a pool table? (Unless of course that’s a Magic 8 Ball, for times when the crystal ball remains cloudy – signs point to yes.)
It seems that Lay Lines has returned to its briefly interrupted tradition of featuring main characters with unpleasant personality quirks.
P.S. Speaking of “Knick Knacks“… :-)
@SteveHL – She could have stolen a skittle from a child’s set, making her even more dodgy.
Is there a punchline here? What’s the joke?
So. Powers, are you suggesting this one is a CIDU?
@ Narmitaj – It took a while to figure out which kind of “Skittles” you meant. Kindle refused to display the preview†, so I first thought of the candy, but opening the frame in a new window revealed the Amazon-ID for a kids’ bowling set, which means you were talking about this kind of “skittles“, which fits much better with your “dodgy” premise.
P.S. † – I think the display problem may have been that the product was only available from Amazon.UK, and not .DE or .COM
P.P.S. @ Powers (& Dana) – Lay Lines doesn’t do many “punchlines” or “gags”, it tends to be little “slice of life” stories, frequently (in my opinion) featuring characters who are seriously in need of some expensive psychoanalysis.
Kilby opines: [Lay Lines]
has returned to its briefly interrupted tradition of featuring main characters with unpleasant personality quirks.And similarly:characters who are seriously in need of some expensive psychoanalysisHowever, though hard to generalize, let me suggest the ones with that sort of character tend also to be “comeuppance” stories. So we are still in a world of drawing a proper moral.
As promised, for the Carol Lay fans, a few more from recent months.
Skipping for now the “Checked Libido” superhero(?) series, here is an apparent standalone called “Lie Lady Lie”.
“The beauty part was that … ”
How New York!
Ok, I’d never heard of it before.
@ Mitch – For those who might like to review the CIDU discussion of “Lie Lady Lie” (click on the blue link).
While I understand that not all comics need a punchline, since this was implied to have been considered for an LOL compilation, I thought there might be some humor here that I was missing. I don’t find any part of the comic amusing or laugh-inducing, so that was the source of my confusion.
This one was “Killer Cactus”:
@ Mitch – Of all the “Lay Lines” strips I have ever seen at CIDU, I think that “Killer Cactus” is (by far) my favorite. I still wouldn’t invite any of the people pictured in it to my home, but the story is surreal enough to keep it separate from the “real” world, which is a huge benefit.
Here is “A Rock’s Life”:
I like that last one. The one about stealing the friends’ stuff would make an interesting dark indie song.
Here is “Flagged”, first take, which ran on Feb 13, 2023 (a Monday, the day each week when GoComics runs a Lay Lines … usually).
[Though originally 2004 according to the (c)]
And then here was another take at “Flagged”, which this year ran the next day, Feb 14, 2023 — i.e. Valentine’s Day. And a Tuesday, not the usual day for GoComics to run Lay Lines.
As comments on that site point out, this looks similar overall, but has some panels re-ordered. And may have a new panel introduced? But does it tell a different story??
I think it is strictly a re-arrangement of the panels, with neither version having a panel that does not appear in the other.
The question of whether the versions tell somehow a different story, raises for me the question of whether either tells a really coherent story. (Even if we add in what we think is the traditional Beauty ant the Beast.)
The second version is slightly more coherent, especially in the last line of panels; it really bothered me in the first version that she knocks after the door has already been opened once (when she didn’t knock) — it’s begging for more explanation the first way; and if it’s a story of how she’s actively ignoring the red flags of her abuser, it again makes more sense in the second version where she has a flashback after seeing each red flag, except for the finale, where she actively sublimates the red flags.
Beauty and the Beast did not come to mind for me; I got Little Red Riding Hood (and the Big Bad Wolf hiding in the cottage), and maybe a role-reversed Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen† in German, meaning “little thorn-rose”) because of the roses, where maybe she shouldn’t wake up the sleeping beau…
†One of the cases where perfect German orthography (sarcasm) falls apart — it’s parsed Dorn-rös-chen (with a distinct “s” sound at the end of “rös” and the soft glottal fricative “ch” in “chen”, and not Dorn-rö-schen, as it appears to read, where the sch cluster signifies the English “sh” sound. I can almost hear my father prevaricating about how nevertheless German is still perfect… My favorite example of dreaded ambiguity sneaking into perfect German is “Nachteilzug”, which can mean either a disadvantageous (forced) move, as in chess (nach-teil Zug), or a rapid (fast) night train (Nacht eil-Zug).
(There is no ambiguity in the German with the “th” cluster, as it has no special meaning in German when combined as opposed to when separate, as in English, so Beethoven and Neanderthal are just unambiguous “t” sounds (possibly aspirated as indicated by the “h”), but definitely not a dental fricative “th” Þ or Ð.)
And the last ones for now (though of course commenters may add whatever links or embeds as they wish), two strips about ghosts: “Moving” and “Ghost town”.
Do you think this was a matter simply of correcting something that got mixed up? Or was it intentional to give us two views on the story, with the second on Valentine’s?
@ Kilby – “Kindle refused to display the preview”
Hmm, I thought I was just putting in a link to an Amazon page, not invoking some display entity.
I also got a problem connecting, though not mentioning Kindle. It just was a UK Amazon site, and wanted me to sign my browser out of US Amazon so it could visit UK Amazon.
Here’s what Narmitaj’s “skittles” page link looks like when you do connnect.
@ larK – Other examples of impenetrable German orthography include “Brathering” (actually “Brat-Hering“, meaning “fried herring”) and the old trick question about whether it should be “der” (masc.), “die” (fem.), or “das” (neut.) “Kulifumdenteich“. The tendency is that the victim will identify the final syllable “Teich” (“pond”) as the root word, and give the corresponding answer “der“, but it’s actually a sentence “(Die) Kuh lief um den Teich“†, so that the article has to match with “Die Kuh” (“the cow”) at the beginning.
P.S. † – “The cow ran around the pond.”
WordPress does some odd things with links on occasion.
@ Brian – WP also converts its own name to CamelCaps, depending on the way it is typed. I have typed none of these three examples in CamelCaps:
wordpress (lowercase)
Wordpress (Capitalized normally)
WORDPRESS (all CAPS)
P.S. Well, I know that I’ve seen WordPress do this before. Unless it only happens in the middle of a sentence, I have no idea why it didn’t do it this time.
P.P.S. Bingo. Apparently only in the middle of running text.
For the record your honor, I typed it in CamelCase originally.