I was going to say, it seems suggestive, but then turns out not. But is that an internal contradiction?
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Neither frame (or booth) is suggestive in the slightest, they are simply hopelessly disjointed and/or surreal. It’s strips like this one that lead to (irritated) reader reactions, which in turn prompt the artist to write counterattacks like this:
I’d call the second quasi-panel plenty suggestive. First for how “jack” suggests a number of phrases. And then by raising the question, How did she become aware of her latex allergy?
P. S. On my phone, this picture really emphasizes that WP’s shrink-to-fit methods don’t work very well, apparently leaving one dimension intact while shrinking only the other one. (It does look better if I turn my phone.)
@DanaK: most people find out about latex allergies from gloves, in fact. It’s one of those things like peanut allergies that is pretty rare, but serious enough that it changes most people’s behaviors. In this case, lots of medical types use non-latex gloves now for everything, to avoid having to quiz every patient and maybe cause a reaction by accident.
If this were a caption, I imagine it’d say something about the early days of Tinder.
I’m lost.
I don’t actually see why the second one is supposed to even be funny… it’s true.
“Latex” just means the white sticky stuff that oozes out of the stems or fruit of various plants. If you squished dandelion stems when you were a kid, you might be familiar with this. Jackfruit has a fair bit of it, but the rubber plant has the most of any. And it has a particularly high percentage of adhesive molecules in its latex, allowing it to be treated and turned into a stretchy natural plastic.
Rubber latex can be made into latex rubber, which, in turn, can be made into protective gloves, tires, condoms, bouncy balls, etc. However, being a natural product, it has proteins; a human body can learn to react to a protein as if it was a pathogen, and react to it anaphylactically.
Substances such as nitrile, made from petrochemicals, doesn’t have those proteins and won’t cause allergies. At this point, almost all protective gear I’ve seen which is designed for direct skin contact is made from nitriles rather than latexes.
However, going back to the comment: while jackfruit latex and rubber latex are chemically somewhat different, they are close enough that a good third of people with rubber latex allergies will react to jackfruit latex.
Even if the author was intending the dialog in the second booth to be a “Nudge, Nudge, Wink Wink” reference to (latex) condoms, there just isn’t any amusement value in it, beyond the tenuous incongruity of a woman from that era making even a veiled reference to something that might possibly be related to (oh, no!) “sex” (heaven forbid). Even a pubescent (male) teenager isn’t going to laugh at that, and I doubt that there are many (if any) teenagers who read “Frog Applause”.
@ Mitch (9) – That’s another classic Frog Applaus that fits my description @1 perfectly. I think Ms. Burritt creates these things solely for her own amusement, and does not care in the slightest whether any other person on the planet understands what she is doing.
Actually there is a substantial claque she gets uncritical support from. You can see them performing for each other in the GoComics comments to some extent, or even more floridly on her separate blog website when it is up and running.
The separate Frog Blog site mentioned by Dana is quite real and active. Here is a post there, responding to this thread here …
Hmm, do I need to clarify that “suggestive” was not meant as a term of criticism, much less abuse, but more descriptive. The suggestions I thought I saw were halfway explicated in the comments thread, but also partially left entirely unsaid. The association of latex to condoms was mentioned. Not mentioned was what the “fruit” (product, result) of a jack would be — which would contribute to the character’s wish/need to avoid it!
I don’t recall what the perceived contradiction was — but “internal” modifying that might have meant internal to CIDU, or our ARLO-handling traditions.
Wait, I remember! I was trying to stretch the sense of “suggestive” to cover various sorts of garden-pathing, or set-up and then not complying with the set-up. So to say something like “It started off to garden-path us, but then turned out not to” is kind of contradictory within itself. Or redundant, if you prefer. Since “starting off to X, but trickily turning out not to X”, whatever the X, is garden-pathing. But you can’t have X = garden-pathing without generating a paradox. (I should have said “paradoxical” instead of “internal contradiction.” My lexical access memory was not at its best that morning, I guess.)
@ DB-LD – Thanks for the link. Since this “artist” seems to be motivated mostly by the hatred she seems to enjoy generating, I think the most humane solution would be for me never to read or comment upon anything she creates ever again. Goodbye, “Frog Applause”, and good riddance.
Just to be clear, that is not a statement of CIDU policy.
Yeah, but maybe it should be….
It’s not clear to me if that’s “motivated by the hatred” or “mocking it to avoid being destroyed by it” :-|
Either way, posting personal attacks on someone where they can’t see it except by accident is kind of poor form.
Right. And also from her pov it might seem that was what we were doing.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Neither frame (or booth) is suggestive in the slightest, they are simply hopelessly disjointed and/or surreal. It’s strips like this one that lead to (irritated) reader reactions, which in turn prompt the artist to write counterattacks like this:
I’d call the second quasi-panel plenty suggestive. First for how “jack” suggests a number of phrases. And then by raising the question, How did she become aware of her latex allergy?
P. S. On my phone, this picture really emphasizes that WP’s shrink-to-fit methods don’t work very well, apparently leaving one dimension intact while shrinking only the other one. (It does look better if I turn my phone.)
@DanaK: most people find out about latex allergies from gloves, in fact. It’s one of those things like peanut allergies that is pretty rare, but serious enough that it changes most people’s behaviors. In this case, lots of medical types use non-latex gloves now for everything, to avoid having to quiz every patient and maybe cause a reaction by accident.
If this were a caption, I imagine it’d say something about the early days of Tinder.
I’m lost.
I don’t actually see why the second one is supposed to even be funny… it’s true.
“Latex” just means the white sticky stuff that oozes out of the stems or fruit of various plants. If you squished dandelion stems when you were a kid, you might be familiar with this. Jackfruit has a fair bit of it, but the rubber plant has the most of any. And it has a particularly high percentage of adhesive molecules in its latex, allowing it to be treated and turned into a stretchy natural plastic.
Rubber latex can be made into latex rubber, which, in turn, can be made into protective gloves, tires, condoms, bouncy balls, etc. However, being a natural product, it has proteins; a human body can learn to react to a protein as if it was a pathogen, and react to it anaphylactically.
Substances such as nitrile, made from petrochemicals, doesn’t have those proteins and won’t cause allergies. At this point, almost all protective gear I’ve seen which is designed for direct skin contact is made from nitriles rather than latexes.
However, going back to the comment: while jackfruit latex and rubber latex are chemically somewhat different, they are close enough that a good third of people with rubber latex allergies will react to jackfruit latex.
Even if the author was intending the dialog in the second booth to be a “Nudge, Nudge, Wink Wink” reference to (latex) condoms, there just isn’t any amusement value in it, beyond the tenuous incongruity of a woman from that era making even a veiled reference to something that might possibly be related to (oh, no!) “sex” (heaven forbid). Even a pubescent (male) teenager isn’t going to laugh at that, and I doubt that there are many (if any) teenagers who read “Frog Applause”.
@ Mitch (9) – That’s another classic Frog Applaus that fits my description @1 perfectly. I think Ms. Burritt creates these things solely for her own amusement, and does not care in the slightest whether any other person on the planet understands what she is doing.
Actually there is a substantial claque she gets uncritical support from. You can see them performing for each other in the GoComics comments to some extent, or even more floridly on her separate blog website when it is up and running.
The separate Frog Blog site mentioned by Dana is quite real and active. Here is a post there, responding to this thread here …
https://lamefrogapplause.blogspot.com/2023/07/these-people-dont-know-jack.html
Hmm, do I need to clarify that “suggestive” was not meant as a term of criticism, much less abuse, but more descriptive. The suggestions I thought I saw were halfway explicated in the comments thread, but also partially left entirely unsaid. The association of latex to condoms was mentioned. Not mentioned was what the “fruit” (product, result) of a jack would be — which would contribute to the character’s wish/need to avoid it!
I don’t recall what the perceived contradiction was — but “internal” modifying that might have meant internal to CIDU, or our ARLO-handling traditions.
Wait, I remember! I was trying to stretch the sense of “suggestive” to cover various sorts of garden-pathing, or set-up and then not complying with the set-up. So to say something like “It started off to garden-path us, but then turned out not to” is kind of contradictory within itself. Or redundant, if you prefer. Since “starting off to X, but trickily turning out not to X”, whatever the X, is garden-pathing. But you can’t have X = garden-pathing without generating a paradox. (I should have said “paradoxical” instead of “internal contradiction.” My lexical access memory was not at its best that morning, I guess.)
@ DB-LD – Thanks for the link. Since this “artist” seems to be motivated mostly by the hatred she seems to enjoy generating, I think the most humane solution would be for me never to read or comment upon anything she creates ever again. Goodbye, “Frog Applause”, and good riddance.
Just to be clear, that is not a statement of CIDU policy.
Yeah, but maybe it should be….
It’s not clear to me if that’s “motivated by the hatred” or “mocking it to avoid being destroyed by it” :-|
Either way, posting personal attacks on someone where they can’t see it except by accident is kind of poor form.
Right. And also from her pov it might seem that was what we were doing.