Month / June 2024

by EditorM

No, it’s just wrong!

No, when it comes to the first panel, I can’t even!

A word I was more likely looking for was “elliptical”.

Well, I’m going to call this a colorist’s error (leading to an interpretive crux) …

… with me thinking it should be green like the delivery bag, but squirrel-shaped, to show that McKenzie (the delivery person, a main character of the strip) succeeded in trapping the critter inside. And she is then giving the customer a live animal, plus whatever part of the order remains unconsumed in the bag, plus (uh-oh!) food already eaten by the animal.

But on further look, I was wrong. It is meant to be the squirrel, with face details clearly shown. And a large satisfied tummy. (Where is the bag? Did he eat that too?) Is her comment to the customer meant to imply the customer could force regurgitation (or slice the animal open!?!) and treat the semi-digested food as still good for human consumption? Well, she doesn’t simply think this will fly — some of the patches in the sky are not clouds but anxiety-sweat beads — so I guess she conveys a just-kidding with that. But who knows?

by Kilby

Bashing on the Drummer

We discussed this first Macanudo strip (in both languages) in the “Macanudo Road” post in April:

At the time I thought that Liniers changed the name of the leader because Ringo is still alive (and John isn’t), but a pair of subsequent strips give me the impression that he just likes bashing on drummers:

(Of course, this strip has absolutely nothing to do with the way nor why Best was actually dumped from the Beatles.)

Just like the first strip above, the question here is “Why Ringo?” (Perhaps he is supposed to be the one with the lowest level of awareness-enhancing substances in his system?)

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – June 15th, 2024

Rather dumb word-argument. But it prompts memory of an assortment of senior-targeted advertising campaigns which for a while used the phrasing “age 50 or better” or “age seventy-and-a-half or better” etcetera. It was supposed to be obvious, yet a sort of joke, that better would mean older. At least one that I heard regularly for a while did change to older; but then later reverted to better ; so I guess there was some complaint but it got resolved, or just overruled.

Come to think of it, probably the word-level associations of squashing things must have played a role in my lifelong aversion to the vegetable of that name.

Chak notes “I’ve read En attendant Godot several times, and I still don’t have a clue.”

Could one expect Godot to comment? Waiting for your comments below.

by Kilby

More Repetitive Asynchronicity

Over a year ago I posted a set of Non-Sequitur comics in which Wiley had repeated the exact same joke (including some lengthy dialog) in three different versions. The following examples from Tom Wilson’s “Ziggy” aren’t nearly as sophisticated, but the identical setups seem to show that the author has either forgotten the own material, or simply doesn’t care (“…just run it again, readers will never remember it…”)

All three of these were created by “Tom II” after his father retired, so it’s not a case of a legacy artist not knowing what the original author wrote: he did these all by himself.

Just three years later, with new artwork, but exactly the same joke, word for word:

Sixteen years after that, a new rendition (and now in color), but it’s still the same gag:

I’m sure that it is difficult (effectively impossible) to remember every single joke over a span of 18.5 years (and over 6800 comics), but insulting Ziggy as “shorty” is something of a running gag (besides these three, I ran into half a dozen other examples), so perhaps reviewing the GoComics archive might have been a good idea. That’s exactly why somebody has been going to all the trouble of making sure that the dialog is included in the GC index.