This gets extra tags — some kinda Meta for not using the standard joke set up in panel 1, and some kinda Geezer warning for those youngsters who don’t see something familiar behind “Killjoy was here”.
Maybe. My local newspaper (Chicago Tribune) has become an indistinct shadow of its former self, and the comics are shrunken and in black and white.
Despite the “(Not a CIDU)” category applied to this post as a whole, this item may take a bit of concentration and research before you can join in saying “Oh, I’ve got it completely decoded now!”.
There will be no arguing over whether this is truly a “meta” comic!
We think this is a rerun; but if so, then it falls into “an oldie but goodie”.
Here’s the funny-sad one promised in the category tags.
BTW, do they have a walkie-talkie set, or is that a quite old-school cell phone?
[Note from 2023 reposting] No comics added as of this reposting. Comments from 2021 and subsequently are preserved. If the note and link at the bottom are a bit confusing, they lead back to a separate posting which was a different version of the Veterans Day Add-ons idea, and is still available in the archive and by that link, but is not herewith being reposted.
[Note from 2021 original posting] Cartoons with Veterans relevance that we recently ran across, or that CIDU Bill had saved to the site’s media library with a note for possible Veterans Day add-on use.
These two we noticed on sequential days in Maria’s Day. Since that strip is on a reruns cycle at GoComics, the actual dates of the recent appearance were 31 August and 01 September, but apparently the original publication was on 10 and 11 November of some year.
There are more good ones that readers added in various years as comments to the original “Arlo’s Veterans Day” post (reposted earlier this morning). But here are others which got posted in various one-off’s at various times.
A very retro Beetle Bailey with a foreshadowing of Vietnam:
Camp Swampy may not ever have been a fighting base, but as this shows, they were not entirely outside a world where military conflict was a reality. And we can count all who served as veterans, whether or not they were in active combat or even in a war zone.
This strip seems to be dated 1964, and early enough in that year that “Viet Nam” did not yet mean all of what it would soon take on. Still, isn’t it a bit shocking that this might strike some of its audience as simply funny?
[Bill’s note from first postings on this site] This is something I made sure to rescue from the old site: after the first time I posted the 1996 sequence with Arlo’s father, somebody asked me to re-post it every year.
Unfortunately most of your comments are gone, but the 47 you posted in 2018 and 2019 are below.
[Note for 2022 — Reposting to continue Bill’s tradition. 2020 and 2021 comments also preserved.]
[Note for 2023 — Reposting, as per tradition. Past and 2022 comments preserved. Add-on comics for Veterans Day / Armistice Day will appear in another post in about an hour.]
This Rhymes with Orange strip might have worked perfectly back in early summer, but now it just seems awkward. The new corporate name just isn’t easy to adapt into usable slang, and even if it were, the political deadweight surrounding the takeover and renaming ruins any possible remaining humor.
In a curious instance of personal asynchronicity, it wasn’t until a couple of hours after I had written the text above (including the headline) that I saw Sunday’s Doonesbury, which needs no further commentary:
I was able to identify the sources for most of the cartoon eyes without help, but I’m still completely stuck on the fifth panel. I’m not going to name the others, so as not to spoil the guessing game for everyone else. P.S. Stay away from GoComics, their idiotic “featured comment” gimmick betrays the rest of the answers.
This was a CIDU for me for a couple minutes. And I’m still not sure of the intended idea.
BTW, is a clock a standard part of Twister play?
Thanks to Maggie-the-Cartoonist for this Loose Parts LOL:
I don’t know whether this is supposed to be the joke / the point of the cartoon, but I think it’s definitely a brilliant choice to have the meeting for the road-ragers take place safely online!