There’s nothing very mysterious about this Wallace the Brave strip (it does help to be familiar with Spud’s somewhat odd personality):
However, that strip reminded of a “Win, Lose, Drew” comic from mid-December:
I seriously doubt that Drew Litton was referring to a specific player, but most of his comics do refer to current sports events. Were there an unusual number of overly “picky” offsides penalties this year? Or was there some other football incident to which this comic is referring?
A few takes on Mickey Mouse entering public domain. The Pinocchio one is particularly apropos.
Thanks to Boise Ed for this LOL from Tundra:
This “dogged effort to learn a foreign language” has paid off!
And as my brother recently messaged me: Yo no soy marinara! Yo no soy marinara! Soy carbonara, soy carbonara, soy carbonara — por ti seré, por ti seré, por ti seré.
Thanks to Boise Ed for sending this in, and affirming that the surface joke is puny but obvious. (That this exec is trying to hold the mascot responsible for the team’s poor performance.)
But then, what kind of a mascot is that, anyway? The writing says Colts, twice, but the costume is a bird. Red because Cardinal? Sharp beak because Raven? Is that confusion a reason the poor thing has failed to energize the fans, and they in turn have failed to energize the players?
Thanks to Jack Applin for sending this in, and starting the debate on tattoo strategy!
As Jack suggests, and the CIDU team agrees, there has to be a mistake and the word “tattooed” should be outside the quotation marks. Still, that leaves a lot of text to fit. ”Also, ‘hands’, plural? Does he want the phrase duplicated on each hand, or two words on one hand, and the rest on the other?” The companion’s remark about fingers suggests the “Night of the Hunter” strategy…
P.S. For more examples of cinematic knuckle-tattooing, see this Guardian bit.
The text in the two languages says the same thing. But piece-by-piece they don’t precisely correspond; so some re-arrangement was needed. But very smoothly done!
Although CIDU Bill drafted this Frazz strip for a post back in June 2020, he never gave it a title or wrote any text for it. I thought today would be an appropriate opportunity for it to appear.
P.S. Even if the bag is only full of wet paper towels, I like the way that the kid is about to punch it to smithereens.
Kilby writes: This is another one of CIDU Bill’s old draft posts from March 2019. The only CIDU element is how he ran into a strip from 2013 nearly five and a half years later. (I checked: Barney & Clyde was not in reruns during that month.)
I thought I *knew*, as an evidence-based origins account and “official” answer, that the term flack for a public relations officer was closely tied to flak “anti-aircraft fire” — via the intermediate occupational descriptive term flak-catcher for their role in deflecting or absorbing abuse and accusation. And that this was popularized in Tom Wolfe’s essay title “Maumauing the Flack Catchers”. (His flak-catchers were local bureaucrats rather than p.r. agents but the idea was closely related.)
But I wanted to check with something besides my own memory, in scholarly sources or some easily-accessible online approximation thereto.
And so, how disappointing that Dictionary.com gives us a story about some guy named Flack, and no mention of flak except a link in a “words sometimes confused with flack” section.
1935–40; said to be after Gene Flack, a movie publicity agent
Well! At least some support from Etymonline, though they also give precedence to Gene Flack, but give some skeptical considerations against him.
flack (n.)
“publicity or press agent,” in Variety headlines by September 1933; sometimes said to be from name of Gene Flack, a movie agent, but influenced later by flak. There was a Gene Flack who was an advertising executive in the U.S. during the 1940s, but he seems to have sold principally biscuits, not movies, and seems not to have been in Variety in the ’30s.
Sure, I guess I’d complain about this too. From Rob Stephens.
Comics I Don't Understand 