Month / January 2024

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, January 14th, 2024

Zippy feeling just a bit meta.

And a semi-CIDU for this same couple:

The question being: Is the guy just pushing his point by selecting a random term meant to be absurd, or else do they maybe have something (like a remote, or an ashtray, …) which is actually crafted to look like a Stegosaurus?

Why not start off Sunday with a bit of math? Roughly how old is she?

This is Frazz’s Sunday intro panel for January 7th. Mallett posts these on Facebook. Otherwise, I’d never see them because GoComics doesn’t use the intro panels, for reasons I don’t understand.

by Kilby

One order of ’shrooms, please.

It’s fairly clear what is happening in each of the visible portions of this Perry Bible Fellowship comic, but I really don’t understand the sequence of events between the second and third panels:


I’m pretty sure that the man in the second panel is the same as the one in the background of the third panel, but if was he the one who called 911, how did he manage to escape the “choice”? And what is the EMT on the sidewalk trying to communicate with her hands?

by Kilby

What’s in a Name?


This Ink Pen rerun from February 2010 just happened to appear on New Year’s Day 2024. I can recognize the cartoon sources for all of the names mentioned by Hamhock, but I can identify only one of Ralston’s examples (the last one: “Goolagong“). I assume that most of the rest would yield relatively quickly to a concerted Internet search, but that’s not what I want to know. Is this a “geezer” and/or “millennial” issue? How many of those twelve names in the first three panels are obvious to the rest of you?

by EditorM

Uppsa! (Awww)

I guess it’s mostly an Awwww. But then, some questions are raised but not answered. Mainly, what’s the joke? Between panels 2 and 3 it changes from two pairs of tracks to one pair — is it meant to be a puzzle, solved by the reveal in panel 4 that one skater is now carrying the other. 

Also: In the first panel, are all the skates drawn correctly facing the way they are going (or are the red ones wrong)? Where we see two pairs of tracks, are they equally skillful or is one more wobbly? In the final panel, are the tracks especially wobbly, and is that sort of the joke? 

by CIDU Bill

Ben and His Marks

ben marks

Kilby writes: This is another one of CIDU Bill’s old drafts from 2019. The reference was so obscure that it might have been suitable for the authors to include their running gag with “Horace”, except that there would not have been enough space for that in a daily strip. (For those interested in background information, most of the sources that I was able to find listed the name as “Benjamin Marks“).

by zbicyclist

Bears

Is this a Noah’s Ark joke? Is there a missing caption? Are they checking the Alaska cruise schedule to see when the tourists with food will arrive? I can’t bear not understanding this.

The joke in this bear comic is clear — the confusing thing is that it appeared December 29. Given that timing, a better punch line would be “Go to sleep. It’s December 29 already!”

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, January 7th, 2024

The holidays are done, but the cartoons are not all done with Xmas and NYear LOLs!

LOL-Ewww did you say?

Does Eric Scott’s drawing style sometimes seem to have a Thurber feel?

This Santino is an almost-CIDU: commenters on his page talk about getting it only after pausing and looking at it another way, or filling in their literary knowledge.

Once upon a time (it was December, actually) Sandra sent this in, and noted it could be a LOL-semi-CIDU as it’s not first-glance obvious what’s going on. 

Actually, the editors’ feeling of confidence in one explanation faded upon discussion. Is this cat-behavior being actively performed by an animated cat-statue? Or is it a static statue of characteristic cat-behavior? 

Either way, it’s the sort of thing cat people regard with loving exasperation. The great filmmaker Agnès Varda felt like putting her cat on a monument, and did so in her short Le Lion Volatil (actuality on left, modification on right):

And as Aaron notes when sending this next one in, Falco really wants to say something about this gap-week.

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – January 6th, 2024

Have you kept count for how many times this joke has come up this week?

Woops! Turns out this is now the third appearance of this “kerning pun” (as jjmcgaffey called it) on CIDU in one path or another. 

This fun Rubes from a few years ago was brought to our attention by Professor Jerry Coyne (a big supporter of ducks) on his Why Evolution is True web site (blog, but he doesn’t like it called that).

As reported by The Daily Cartoonist (but nowhere visible at mutts.com), Patrick McDonnell has announced that he will be taking a six-month sabbatical to work on other projects, and that (almost all of) the strips from now to June will be re-runs (note the absence of any year in the copyright line on this one).

by EditorM

Far from home

The artist’s title for this one is “Far From Home”, and the mailing message was “In the future all magazines will have one issue.” 

I can pretty much follow the time-travel ruminations. But there is much more backstory than anything I remember them doing. But then, I haven’t been a fan forever — perhaps someone who has can tell us how this was all anticipated long ago…?