Uh-oh! “Arlo” warning for younger and more sensitive viewers.
As many here will already know, these Nick G “comics” originate as illustrations accompanying the Washington Post advice column conducted by Carolyn Hax. The connection is sometimes close, and often sort of tangential. The column is behind a paywall, but for those interested here is a free “gift article link” to the August 23 column.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Here’s another Nancy that struck me as over-determined meta, though with some CIDU residue
A good friend plays ‘bone and his wife plays French horn, so the Andertoons is perfect!
Well, that trombone certainly wasn’t rusty!
About the Andertoons — I was going to leave this one alone, but in the interests of being thorough — good alternate caption is “Sax in bed is bad to the bone”.
Then there’s me, trying to figure out the mechanics of how the trombone’s glissando would affect the horn.
How do you make a trombone sound like a French horn? Stick your hand in the bell and miss a lot of notes.
How do you make a French horn sound like a trombone? Take your hand out of the bell and miss a lot of entrances.
Oh so cruel! Probably from a violist! :-)
At least there’s no sax and violins in these comics.
I like the Nancy one. The title panel in that comic had me wondering if it was possible to arrange the strokes of each letter so that the title could be rotated 180 deg. and still be readable. I recall a column in Scientific American magazine from several decades ago featuring text that could be rotated and still read the same.
@ Grawlix (8) – I tried looking at the title panel “umop apisdn”(†). Although the rotational symmetry does seem intentional, it’s only approximate (not close enough to produce a readable result).
P.S. (†) – Luckily, I did this with a tablet, so I didn’t need to invert my desktop monitor. :-)
¡ɯoɔ˙ʇxǝʇʎɐʎ ɯoɹɟ ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ʇǝƃ oʇ ʍoɥ ɹǝqɯǝɯǝɹ I ʞuıɥʇ I
Grawlix, I think that might have been after Martin Gardner had passed away and his beloved “Mathematical Games” column in SciAm had been taken over by Hofstadter. Hofstadter had an interest in special fonts and several times discussed the Metafont program (Which I was familiar with as the maintainer of the whole TeX package for the CS Department). The cover of his breakthru book Gödel Escher Bach features a block carved to show different letters in the light-and-shadow effect depending on which direction the light goes – a tricky bit he also explored in the column.
Thanks to the above comment I was able to poke around and find that the rotatable text is called an inversion or an ambigram, and that one person who’s known for this sort of thing is Scott Kim. I wasn’t expecting the Nancy title to actually be rotatable, I was just reminded of Mr. Gardner’s column, and musing whether it could be done.
Oh yes, right, Scott Kim! I remember his designs and fonts bein featured more than once in that column — probably in the Gardner era?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I saw Scott Kim’s work in the Gardner column, though I now see there have been a number of artists doing similar things. (see Artists section at bottom of page) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram
The Wikipedia article says that it was Hofstadter who coined the term ambigram. It seems likely that he discussed the topic during his time with the column. (Perhaps in addition to Gardner.)