I saw this cartoon on Facebook, and thought there was a little something wrong with the wording of the dialog, or something like that.
Anybody else confused by this?
I made a comment, and got what I thought was a snarky reply. But that commenter added something about “not trying to be snarky” and actually explained something I hadn’t understood. (But that’s what we’re all about here, Not-Understanding Comics.)
(But in the comments discussing the content of the cartoon, Mr. Greenbar did come off as argumentative and rather, yes, snarky.)
Is this convention/technique something that people here know about?
Comics I Don't Understand 
In the top row the same (thin) person is talking; similarly in the second row the same (not so thin) person is speaking, but I only figured it out after going through it twice and then noticing the the weird internal-pointer thing, as I see was mentioned in the comment dialogue you posted (I nearly posted my own comment without noticing yours at first).
I haven’t seen that before, I don’t think, and it is confusing – especially the second row, where it looks very much as though the left-side woman is speaking but actually it’s the right-side woman. Normally, of course, one would expect the balloons of the same person either to cluster round the speaker or to be connected by a channel, so the system used here requires me (us) to do too much work to read the thing, and it is to be discouraged by all right-thinking people.
Overall, it’s not a style that can be pulled off convincingly. Ho ho.
So basically a “Yo Mama” joke…
The pun on “pull off” is effectively the same as in this “Last Kiss” panel, which mitch submitted to CIDU Bill five years ago:
I found the comic confusing at first, until the explanation of the balloon-ownership. It would be much easier to understand if the artist had linked the two balloons, but maybe this is a new thing.
Like narmitaj, I too had to read it twice to figure out the proper ownership of the speech balloons. That subtle innie/outie distinction was too subtle for me, as I’m accustomed to the normal convention of placing speech bubbles near the head of the speaker.
I’ve never seen that innie/outie convention used anywhere before.
@Kilby has it. The joke is that the woman on the left’s boyfriend “pulled off” the clothes from the woman on the right, who was told she couldn’t “pull off” the outfit.
Huh. I took it as ONE woman talking to herself, seeing herself as thin enough or not. And saying “**** all y’all” in the last image.
@ Phil (7) – My initial reading was about the same as yours, until I read narmitaj’s comment @1.
Thanks for the recollection, Kilby. Now I’m uncertain whether it was me, or Bill, or the ravages of time, that erased the last half of the Dark Side of the Horse strip.
Later : Aha!! Fooled me again!
On that bubble-speaker new convention: before seeing that explanation, I did have an almost-satisfactory account of anyway the top row. On this account, the character on the right is the speaker of the bubble on the right — but when she says “your body type” she does not actually mean the thin-bodied other woman. Rather, she would be quasi-quoting what she supposed the thinner woman would be addressing to her thicker-bodied self.
But that sort of indirect reverse-attribution doesn’t at all work for the second line. So, absurd as that innie/outie (thanks,Powers) convention may seem to those of us encountering it for the first time, it’s the best explanation to getting this comic to cohere.
It gets simpler if you ignore all the positioning and arrows and just look at whose mouth is open.
The innie-outie bubbles are from manga. The innie is usually meant for “speaker is off-panel” but can also as in this case mean that the speaker is not the closest character to the bubble. It avoids the awkward bridging lines American comics use when the art doesn’t allow enough room for speech bubbles in the right places.
(This comic has been going around online for about a decade, I think.)
I was not familiar with the innie/outie bubble convention, but if it’s from manga, that’s not surprising. I didn’t have much trouble figuring out who was talking, though, as only one character looks like they are speaking in each “panel.”
“You just have to know how to read comics” should really be “you just have to know how to draw comics”. This is the first time I’ve seen such a thing, and even though it makes sense now, it’s not very intuitive, especially when the inward arrows are so tiny. What if there are more than two people in the scene?
I didn’t have any trouble understanding this comic, and I loved it. But the hearty laugh was when I read that comment about Mitch not understanding comics.
I’d never seen the innie/outie thing in speech bubbles before either, but I got this one right away. And that last panel made it an LOL. Bam!
Never seen this before, and it’s unnecessarily confusing.
The Last Kiss Kilby shows above has better art and a better rendition of the joke.
Here is a page about manga speech bubbles:
https://www.animeoutline.com/how-to-draw-manga-speech-bubbles/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cbasic%E2%80%9D%20bubble%20that%20is,that%20is%20producing%20the%20sound.
According to this writer, Mr. Greenbar is partially correct, as the inverted tail refers to a character off-panel, whereas both of these characters are on-panel.
Mr. Greenbar could have come off as unsnarky if he had said “You just have to need to know how to read manga.”
“You really think you can pull off that outfit?”
“Your boyfriend didn’t have any trouble pulling it off last night!”
I figured it out pretty quickly, although I was not familiar with the manga convention.
There are probably far more comic readers than manga readers (at least in America). Let’s see what happens if we transpose the “manga” speech bubbles to the standard “comic” conventions:
P.S. I really like Daniel’s condensed version of the dialog (@19), which would reduce the strip to two rows (first girl from row 1, then the second girl from row two, then the third row), but that would have been a lot more work. Using a computer font for the text would ruin the charm of the drawings.
P.P.S. I edited the image to remove the “handprint” from the second row.
Bravo!
OK, if you liked that, here’s Daniel’s condensed dialog in graphic form:
P.S. The utterly amazing thing about this comic is that even after 20 comments, it wasn’t until I shifted the images for this most recent iteration that I noticed the spurious “handprint” touching the girl’s skirt in the second row of the original image.
P.P.S. @ zbicyclist (17) – To be fair, the anonymous artist of this “Pull Off” comic appears to have drawn and lettered it by hand, whereas “Last Kiss” is fashioned from retreaded comic book panels, applying modified dialog using a computer font. The process is about the same as what Melcher does with “That Is Priceless”.