These are just whatever was at least pretty good, was dated today, and was in some way about the Labor Day holiday or tradition. … A quick survey of which cartoons were willing to be about the holiday and which preferred to go on their own way.
Labor-day-published gallery
- (Not a Cidu), Holiday-Thematic, LOL
- (Barney Google and) Snuffy Smith, Angry Little Girls, Art and Chip Sansom, Baldo, Baldo en Español, Bill Bettwy, Blondie, Brian Walker, Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, Cantú and Castellanos, Dave Whamond, Day by Dave, Dean Young, Ellis Rosen, Francesco Marciuliano, Frank and Ernest, Greg Walker, Hi and Lois, John Hambrock, John Marshall, John Rose, John Zakour and Scott Roberts, Judge Parker, Junk Drawer, Karen Moy and June Bridgman, Lela Lee, Maria's Day, Mary Worth, Mike Manley, Mutts, Nancy, Olivia Jaimes, Patrick McDonnell, Take it from the Tinkersons, Thaves, The Born Loser, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, Working Daze
- 33 Comments
Comics I Don't Understand 
This Garfield strip is my all-time favorite Labor Day comic:
P.S. Some years ago I had a lot of trouble finding it, because I had (incorrectly) remembered it as being a poem by Wiley (in “B.C.”). At the time I was quite surprised to re-discover that it was a very early Garfield.
Grumpy comment… notice how none of the comics, or anything, ever mention Unions, the ostensible reason for the holiday. And, for that matter, how the only one which has workers in it uses the Westinghouse “Rosie”, with Westinghouse being a particularly anti-Union company. To be fair, they did the non-horrible anti-Union organizing thing of actually offering benefits in excess of what Unions tended to demand in order to undercut reasons to unionize, but it nonetheless doesn’t make sense to celebrate them on Labor day.
@ Ian Osmond – I’ll second that grump, although I’ve always associated “Rosie” with wartime motivational propaganda, rather than anything to do with unions. The thing that bothers me most about that “Mary Worth(less)” strip are the rah-rah happy faces everyone is wearing (and that “celebrate” really seems to mean “pay lip-service to“). The overall “cringe” effect is very similar to the “Baldo” strip that appeared on July 4th.
P.S. @ Brian in StL – Please let us know whether you enjoyed working with Frank & Ernest as colleagues at Megacorp!
So what doesn’t scan right about Ed having Labor Day off?
He’s so overworked, that seeing him resting for a change is disconcerting?
He’s so lazy, that seeing him not working on a day he’s supposed to be not working is disconcerting?
Either way, who are you that you feel it is in your purview to judge when and whether Ed should have off, as if he isn’t a full human being with his own agency and autonomy?
We thank you corporate overlords for allowing us unworthy consumers to have a day off from our just daily toil for the benefit of the shareholders to engage in the ritual incineration of ground meat products with the firm understanding that we will work twice as hard on Tuesday to make up the difference.
@ larK (5) – I’ve never followed “Working Daze” in any of its various incarnations, so my initial assumption was that “Ed” was simply unemployed (Q: “What do the unemployed call ‘Labor Day’?; A: ‘Monday’). However, the Wikipedia summary describes him as an exceptionally lazy cow orker.
P.S. @ Ian (2) – A quick search for “Labor Day Comics” revealed that there are plenty of artists who do address some of the more serious issues associated with the holiday, but the vast majority of these are “editorial” cartoons (often too political for CIDU), rather than comic “strips”. The only one I found in the latter category was this Stone Soup from a dozen years ago:
So puritanical option b), he should be being punished for being lazy instead of allowed to sleep in a hammock. Lady, you’ve been letting Ed live rent free in your brain for too long — what do YOU care what he does?! Do you own the business? Then FIRE Ed! Are you just another cow-orker of the sheeple? Then quit this damn company if they can’t allocate workers properly such that they are a detriment to you, and if they are not a detriment to you, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU CARE?!
And yes, to the point raised, Labor Day is about Organized Labor — go out and organize yourselves!!
…Sorry–
ha, ha, it’s funny ’cause it’s true…
I saw the Junk Drawer panel in action this weekend: at least one store held off until September 1 before stocking Halloween merch.
@larK, if I place her correctly, she’s formally a coworker on his level, BUT she is assistant for the mid-level manager in charge of this group so she has something like authority. Plus, she has some medusa-like supernormal powers.
@Kilby
It originally WAS a B.C. comic with Wiley writing the poem, and it was long, LONG before Garfield ever appeared.
I remember it from one of the old pocket paperback collections of B.C. Back when the books cost $0.95 or so. EARLY 70s for the book. Probably 60s for the comic.
Our Boarding house, Labor Day 1929
Kilby said he had trouble finding that favorite Garfield strip. How do you find a specific old strip (assuming it wasn’t indexed in CIDU)? I used to have a mounted copy of Andy Capp gazing at the brewery and sighing “So much beer and so little time.” It was from 30-40 years ago, but I’ve no idea how to find it now.
Grumpy comment from me…. The “We Can Do It!” gal from the Westinghouse poster has no name. She is not Rosie the Riveter, though in recent years the two have become conflated.
“…the image was strictly internal to Westinghouse, displayed only during February 1943, and was not for recruitment but to exhort already-hired women to work harder.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It!
If Frank n Ernest had worked with me, they’d have learned valuable lessons. Like “work smarter, not harder.” No, wait, that’s not right. “Work lazier, not harder.” That’s it.
A day late, but maybe not a dollar short —
@Boise Ed: Garfield.com used to contain a full archive of every strip but apparently now that PAWS, Inc., has been acquired by Viacom/CBS/Paramount, the site redirects to Nickelodeon and focuses on the animated Garfield.
A Google search led me to this searchable archive of transcribed Garfield strips: https://www.lasagna.cz/
I would be surprised if something similar exists for Andy Capp, but one never knows…
@ Nebulous (11) – I have found several Internet comments that indicate that my memory of the pre-existing B.C. strip may be correct, but not a single one that points to an actual image or the precise date when that B.C. strip originally appeared. I highly doubt that Jim Davis would have intentionally plagiarized Hart’s work; I suspect it may have percolated through his subconcious recollection of something he may (or may not) have read more than a dozen years before he recomposed the poem.
P.S. @ Powers (17) & Boise Ed (13) – If you are trying to find a comic based on the dialog contained in the strip, the best place to try first is GoComics (assuming that the feature is carried there). This works very well for many of the more popular strips (such as Calvin & Hobbes and Garfield), or whenever the author and/or syndicate has taken the time to get the dialog transcribed into the search index. However, many other strips (such as “B.C.” and “Bloom County”) have absolutely no dialog indexed, and therefore remain “unfindable”.
The fundamental problem with B.C. (and probably Andy Capp) is that both strips have had a checkered history with a number of various syndicates. This means that there may not be any sort of uniform digital archive for either strip. In addition, anything published by King Features (as B.C. was at one time) is now held behind a paywall, making it un-indexable for the general public.
Another day-late entry. (Take it from the Tinkersons.)
Is the guy with the soft-sculpture hat a boss?
Mitch4 (19): I suspect that’s supposed to be a hard hat.
Kilby (18): I took a look at https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes and didn’t find anywhere to initiate a search, other than looking for a comic by title.
Thanks, Ed — I was considering that, but my eyes didn’t take in the bumpy top as hard-hat. But it does make sense.
Major Hoople, of Our Boarding House, was possibly a retired soldier, possibly a retired something else, more likely never had anything to retire from. “We who labor and toil” includes himself only in his own imagination, nobody being able to remember any time when he labored or toiled at anything.
As I recall, Ed wears a cowboy hat.
White hard hats come in a variety of styles, most with a bump or two.
But in this case, it is not a hard hat. Ed works in an office, not the factory. He’s the big boss.
This discussion may be taking in two different comics!
There was the Working Daze within the post – showing Ed in the foreground, sleeping of course, and bareheaded, while Jay stands by the grill and is wearing a white chef’s toque. Then there was the Tinkersons embedded in my comment number 19, with a guy who situationally must be a boss or foreman, wearing a white hat with bumps, that probably is a safety hardhat though I originally did not think so.
@ Boise Ed (18) – The search bar at the top of the GoComics website (the one that says “Search for Your Favorite Comic“) is not just for titles, it will accept (and find) any sort of text content that has been incorporated into their index. If you know the name of the comic, it’s best to open (any) strip first, and then initiate the search from that page. For instance, typing “inside out” into the search field on that “Calvin and Hobbes” page leads straight to the corresponding strip:
Around here in NYS Labor Day used to be the last hurrah before school started. Schools on Long Island always started the Wednesday after Labor Day and in NYC on the Monday after.
As I understand it from my late dad – who as an adult I was shocked to find out was not ALWAYS right – this difference was due to the fact that NYC had fewer snow days than elsewhere in the state as children lived close to their schools (due to density of housing) and could get there when the snow was too much for us out here who had to take a bus to school. (Yes, as an adult I understand that upstate NY normally has MUCH more snow than down here – but that was what he told me – so I still say same, because as a loving daughter “my dad is NEVER wrong”.)
Now with the additional holidays being added to the school calendars – Diwali, Lunar New Year, Ramadan… the schedule has to run longer to accommodate the additional days that schools are closed during the school year – depending on the student and teacher populations and their religious holidays – in the district.
I think 2 districts out here opened before Labor Day this year. Most, including our local district started on Tuesday, day after Labor Day. NYC schools are starting on Thursday after Labor Day.
In normal years before Covid we would have been away through Labor Day since Robert retired. When he was working he was executive director of a day mental health program for children with emotional health problems and served as school and counseling services for the children. We would have to be back from vacation for Labor Day weekend so he could make sure that the program was ready to start on time afterwards. (It is a full year program.) Since Covid we have gone on only 2 one day trips as our RV ages in our driveway.
Left out of comment – The first time I heard of school starting before Labor Day was when reading “Baldo” strips online.
@ Meryl – “…school starting before Labor Day…”
Back when I was in school (in Maryland), there was (and may still be) a law in Virginia that specifically forbid any county in the state from starting school before Labor Day. In the D.C. area, this was occasionally referred to “King’s Dominion subsidy regulation”.
Kilby – interesting theory.
Thanks, Mitch4 and Kilby, but no luck. I suspect the GoComics search looks for any of my clues, not all of them. I went to their andycapp site and searched for “so much beer, so little time, Andy Capp” (and several permutations thereof), but no luck. I was surprised to find so many non-Capp hits, but perhaps those had Capp in their comments or somesuch.