This Crankshaft is from Usual John:
And he asks “Who is the creepy-looking old lady to the right? She just continues to stand wordlessly in the background over the next few days, as the book club fails to read Ulysses.”
As an incidental artistic problem, I wonder what the artist had in mind (or had as a model) in drawing the book and its cover. I can’t match it to any edition of Ulysses I can find discussed online. And that man pictured can’t plausibly be identified as Joyce, nor as either of the leading male characters, Bloom and Stephen.
Comics I Don't Understand 
She looks like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Any book featuring her might have been a better choice, perhaps.
Rob W, I noticed the resemblance too. Maybe it isn’t such a bad guess. Ulysses embodies books that are admired but mostly unread, and unread for good reason – it’s long, feels alien in its approach, and is difficult to understand. Works by Agatha Christie, the most popular writer in history, are short, cozy, and perfectly transparent after Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot has explained everything to us.
Rob W nailed it @1, see the strip dated 21-Jan-2023:
Well, so much for the Sylvia Beach theory! (Which was in the original GoComics comments.)
Thanks, Kilby — but to my mind the big help from the background you’ve tracked down is not in the identification of Miss Marple as much as clarifying this is a physical prop in the bookstore, “actually” physically there, and thus neither a ghost nor a symbolic intrusion. (I had never heard the term “one-one figure” but suppose it specifies the size/scale.)
@ mitch (4) – That “one-one figure” is classic Batiuk-ese: an alleged “standard” slang term that has never been used by anyone else on the planet. See the Batiuktionary.
If that is a prop figure from the earlier comic. Why is she wearing blue in the first comic and brown now?.
Because colorists are underpaid flunkies with very short attention spans.
Anonymous, I have learned by observation that comic strip colourists apparently do not read the speech and thought balloons, let alone previous days’ strips, and seem to have appallingly short memories – sometimes changing the colour of a garment or object from one panel to the next.
Kilby is more concise than I and probably types faster.
On second thought, if coloring is subcontracted to an agency, or is done by more that one individual, it’s quite likely that the person who did the story arc in January may not be the same as the one who worked on the strip in September. But as Ooten Aboot indicated, that is still no excuse for failing to read the current or previous day’s dialog.
@ Ooten Aboot (9) – The main reason that my sentence @7 was so concise was precisely because it was not “typed”. The sudden change inflicted by wordpress on the CIDU comment entry field has rendered my usual Mac desktop “incompatible”, so all my comments in this thread have had to be “thumb tipped” into my mobile phone, hense the terseness.
P.S. Embedding graphics under these conditions (see @3) is a royal P.I.T.A.
A full-sized model/prop can be said to be “1:1 scale”.
But as Ooten Aboot indicated, that is still no excuse for failing to read the current or previous day’s dialog.
That presumes the colorist can read the dialog (ie: they speak English); probably this work has been outsourced overseas, and the average colorist can’t read the dialog, or if they can, can’t really make heads or tails of it anyway (I say commenting on site dedicated to explaining comics…)
Yeah, what a PITA the new form is! I just got tricked into posting anonymously, too!
(And it fails to work at all on my old Mac…)
$%^&!!!
Blue dress, brown dress … maybe it’s a mood dress, like those old mood rings. :)
But, seriously, the colorist seems to have been consistently brown in this short story arc (much shorter than Ulysses!). But it’s a bit unreasonable to expect the colorist to know what the color was in January, or even that this character had appeared before, unless in some unlikely event they are paid enough to do detailed research. And detailed research has not been a hallmark of Batiuk’s strips.
I was not able to find either of the two previous instances in which this book club supposedly already read “Ulysses”. The logical date to stage it would have been “Bloomsday” (June 16th), but that’s a little too obscure for “Crankshaft”. In any case, since this strip has provided little (if any) entertainment on the subject, it’s time to look elsewhere, such as Frazz:
Then there is this Adam@Home, which was at least placed close to a semi-Irish holiday (notice the page count):
The clear winner is this Richard’s Poor Almanac (which was reworked from a prior version that appeared four years earlier):
P.S. I really like how the final frame circles back to dovetail with the first.
P.S. @ larK (14) – As you might have guessed from my tirade @11, I moved down to my other (more modern) iMac (with a real keyboard) to unleash this barrage of comics. Once the browser has the login saved, the new comment dialog is actually quite nice, and it also solves the prior issue of the entry field being 2/3rds of a line high. Too bad it only works on an obnoxiously narrow selection of the most modern hardware and/or software.
I thought is was Mary Worth.
Thanks for the identification. I didn’t think she looked like Molly Bloom. (An early retirement project of mine was reading Ulysses.)
As for the cover, perhaps he didn’t want to risk copyright infringement, so did his own? It’s not like there is an iconic image that would be important to use.
Generally, coloring for the daily strips is done by third-party services. This can be very obvious with some serial strips where colors vary from the Sunday ones. Years ago, in Sally Forth, Ted was coaching Hillary’s Little League team. The uniform colors were wildly different. I have noticed that Dick Tracy has been doing better. I don’t know if the syndicate has been sending notes or what.
In #18, is the bottom-left person humorist, comics creator and Dave Barry’s editor Gene Weingarten?
<IMG SRC=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gene_Weingarten_276682.jpg”>
That is a completely valid image tag, WordPress!
Re the front cover: It IS James Joyce.
-Pete
@ Carl Fink – I totally agree with that identification, and was already planning to send it in to The Gene Pool as soon as the latest “Invitational” post goes live later today.
P.S. wordpress only supports a limited selection of HTML tags, and IMG is not one of them (besides that, you also forgot a quote after the equals sign). To get an image to “embed” into a comment, you have to place the “naked” URL on a line all by itself, with no other characters preceeding or following it. In addition, the URL must end with one of the supported image file extensions (.GIF, .JPG, & .PNG are the only ones that I am sure of). Complicated image URLs that include additional parameters after the file name will not work. For example:
P.P.S. ooops. That was a link to the Wikipedia file page, and not a direct link to the image. Here’s the URL that should embed:
All this detective work about the possible Miss Marple!
@ Pete – Excellent catch. Your link @25 to the picture of Joyce had exactly the same problem as my link to Weingarten @26. Here’s Joyce:
Thanks for the tip, @Kilby.
@ Carl Fink (23) – Gene Weingarten reacted to the visual comparison in the latest edition of the Invitational, now located at The Gene Pool:
“Richard and I were good friends. He illustrated my column. There was no need to ask, and he had no obligation to warn me. In fact, he had an obligation NOT to warn me, so I’d be surprised and spit my coffee. Which I did.
The likeness is excellent. He fattened me up a little bit, and I NEVER wear shorts, which he knew. So this was an assault.”
P.S. I would like to encourage CIDU readers to try out the Invitational. However, now that it has been freed from the confines of “family newspaper censorship”, its content has become more “adult”, meaning both “political”, as well as “NSFW”. You have been warned, but nevertheless, it’s still highly entertaining.
Sadly enough most people deem Ulysses’ successor, Finnegans Wake, an unreadable Moloch. The impression exists that only accomplished philologists are able to read Finnegans Wake. All the other ones have to relay upon heavily annotated versions. So I took it upon me to merge Finnegans Wake with the most beautiful book ever printed (the Kelsey-Chaucer), replaced all the foreign language idiosyncrasies with their English equivalent and streamlined Joyce’s sibylline prose. Here Comes Everybody’s Karma (isbn 9781737783299) will be released on June 11, 2024 in Dublin at the Bloomfestival. After that, everybody will be able to judge if the book is the most elaborated literary hoax ever, or the work of a genius (OK, I admit, I have dumbed it down a little). I’m currently releasing excerpts on my website Maharajagar dot com and an ARC is available on netgalley by using this link https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/358599
I spent a lot of time with FW, reading criticism/assistance books, the text, and group study / reading plans. Even had a paper strip with numbered lines so it could be laid along the page to follow references in the 4.14 style. But can’t say I reached the point of being able to open it and read for pleasure. (Which is absolutely the case for Ulysses! Though there are sneerers here who think even U is a fraud on the literary community.)
I find Ulysses a work of genius, but have my doubts about FW. I’m inclines to believe that it is the autobiography of a borderline schizophrenic that has been encoded with the help of 64 dictionaries. On the other hand, many geniuses suffer to some degree of schizophrenia. Conclusion: it may be a brilliant literary hoax, although I have difficulties to imagine that someone can spend 17 years of his life to cook up a such thing.
Well if your edition is going to tone down the multilingual pinning, you may lose the bloc of fans who value it most for precisely that! 🙄🤷🏻♀️
Einstein once said: make it as simple as you can, but not any simpler. I have edited out the ivory tower from the text and made it accessible for those who don’t want to read a book that contains more footnotes than actual prose. The stream-of-consciousness writing style still makes it a difficult read. You could say that I have dumbed down FW to the level of Ulysses.
I think that would have to be, As simple as you need to, but not any simpler.
Anyhow, I’ve read the sample passage at the top post of your blog. Very interesting! I hope the project goes well for you.
I was just dredging up the Einstein quote from somewhere at the bottom of my sub-conscient mind. Your version sounds more like it should be, although I don’t have the wits to google it.