It seems like we will be getting a lesson, about caring or something like that. But who is the “invisible woman”? The strongly drawn character in the foreground, whose story we have no difficulty seeing? Or one of the dimmed-out supernumeraries in the background, whose narrative we see only in chopped-up pieces? And either way, … so what?
Comics I Don't Understand 
The people in the background are ignoring the woman in the foreground. We can see her, but to them, she is invisible.
Foreground lady. No one even notices she’s there. Middle-aged and older women report this experience being pretty common.
And to answer “so what”, I think that Bolling is commenting on how elderly people and their experiences are often ignored, as if they do not pertain to anything current. Or that some people, in general, just live their lives invisibly, not being noticed or acknowledged by those around them. Not funny, but sad.
The blonde in the back is talking to her friend. The woman in the foreground, overhearing this, has thought of a similar experience in her life, and is interrupting to tell it.
(a) they are ignoring her, but (b) she’s interrupting. The age gap is shown so the artist can indicate she’s not in the friend circle that the two in the back are.
It’s slice of life, rather than kneeslapper funny.
One possible reason that Bolling composes these “mildly funny” strips is that some of them get used in his “super-pak” collections, where part of the humor is the incremental comparison with other strips.
Ding Ding Ding Ding! 87,000 comments!
True, it’s not an excitingly round number. But it’s not every day that I notice even a round thousand.
I see it as a commentary how relationships haven’t really changed, but the method of interaction has.
That looks like a coffee shop or some other place that different groups could be present. The people in the background are background conversations one might overhear and not interacting with the older woman, but something one of them said made the older woman remember the solder she once dated. I didn’t see it at all as being about older women being ignored nor as her trying to interject.
The two experiences seem similar, although separated by a huge time gap. Older woman interacted with letters. Younger woman through electronic means. Both seem to have issues with a love interest.
Mitch4 (6): I assume you mean 87,000 comments since the start of CIDU. That seems like too few, and yet it seems way too many for the time since you nice people took over after Bill’s demise.
BTW, has anyone heard why Comics Kingdom shut off comments (on all strips, as far as I can tell)?
When did CK do that? There were about the usual number of comments on the few strips there when I follow when I checked this afternoon. I do note that the most recent ones were about fours hours ago (1-2pm Central).
Ed, it’s how many since Bill moved the site from Go Daddy and established it here at WordPress.com. I wasn’t doing any fancy arithmetic or historical digging, just looking at something like this on the comments management page :
The zeros for Pending and Spam are how many currently waiting in those queues. Of course there have been many more Spam submitted comments, but all have been either approved or subject to “Delete Forever” — not sent to Trash. The 5 not yet emptied from Trash were sent there mostly when people didn’t see their comments and tried again, resulting in duplicates, one of which then went into Trash.
I share with Brian the doubts about why you are not seeing comments at CK. They do have them, albeit a quite unsatisfactory system.
A few years back Doonesbury had a gender flip version: Aging boomers Mike and classmate Bernie were chatting with a bored female cashier, who perceived them as disembodied voices. The last line was Mike saying something like, “When did this happen?”
Mitch4: 87,000 is VERY round.
So what, indeed.
This is the Doonesbury strip (from 24-July-2011) that bensondonald referred to @11:
Apparently, based on someone else’s statement, CK check whether one has paid them and delete the comments link for those who haven’t done so. I have been so disgusted at the sorry start of their software that I have not paid them since then. Until this week, any stranger could see the comments pop-up, and anyone who logged in could reply.
I never knew that the “new” Comics Kingdom had a comment section, and I would never have missed it (I keep hoping that GoComics will stop showing a randomly selected “featured comment” under every comic). However, the newest, most irritating stupidity at Comics Kingdom is that they have inserted a frame for an animated Popeye cartoon that cannot be disabled, and which keeps reappearing and re-starting, no matter how many times it has been closed and/or paused. Idiots.
Apparently, based on someone else’s statement, CK check whether one has paid them and delete the comments link for those who haven’t done so.
I’m not a paid member, or member at all. I see the comments there just fine. I can’t make any. There were a typical number of comments on the few strips I follow today.
I keep hoping that GoComics will stop showing a randomly selected “featured comment” under every comic.
It’s not random, but rather the one with the most replies.
@ Brian (18) – I think the number of “likes” is also significant, possibly even more so than the replies.
From what I’ve seen the Super Fun Pak comics tend to be satirical, often mocking old and bland comic strips.
Aren’t the Super Fun Pak strips supposed to be viewed as a group, (like a newspaper page) rather than split up individually as posted on the comics site?
@ Grawlix (20) – That’s exactly what I thought, too, but I have not been able to find out where the collected versions appear online. GoComics only shows the individual strips.
Someone here (I apologize for not remembering who) recently posted a CIDU comment with a link to a review-article about SFPC, taking a friendly yet stern approach, and (this is me overgeneralizing and with shaky memory) celebrating the original early appearances as an imitation full-page feature, which this critic thought worked very well, but lamenting the later developments, both the use as separate strips by GoComics and the increasing staleness of some of the content.
I think the number of “likes” is also significant, possibly even more so than the replies.
I don’t believe that is the case. A check of my subscribed strips today was strictly by reply count. If you can find a counter-example, I’d be interested.
Grawlix (20) & Kilby (22)- the full page SFPC appear originally (and occasionally) under Reuben’s “Tom the Dancing Bug”.
Kilby (16): When CK dumped Disqus and revamped their software last spring, they put the comments in a large pop-up window, so you couldn’t compare a comment to the comic without closing it. They also offered three sortings: newest, oldest, and “best” (which is the worst choice).
Today I found that opening a CK comic in Firefox or Safari does show the comments, but in Chrome it does not (and has not, for about a week now). Vivaldi opens the comments window, but doesn’t show the comments!
@ Boise Ed (25) – If the problems with comments are browser-dependent, that explains why I have never seen them. I prefer trusty, reliable (meaning outdated) hardware, so my browser versions tend to be outdated, too. If that shields me from some of the newest CK-nonsense, that’s fine.
P.S. There are downsides to this strategy, of course. One of the disadvantages of running CIDU on a default WordPress-hosted system is that we are dependent on whatever new versions (and bugs) that WordPress cares to unleash upon us. In addition, WP doesn’t seem to care one iota about MacOS compatibility. I am currently down to two machines (one MacBook and one iPad) that can both comment on and edit CIDU posts (I have another Mac that can comment, but no longer can edit: WP torpedoed its admin compatibility earlier this year; up to that point it had been my favorite CIDU platform).
Things were simpler (albeit riskier) before ComicGeddon, when CIDU was hosted by the AntiChrist (GoDaddy). The WP software version there was static, and did not care in the slightest about whether the user was logged in, or not. This advantage is still shared by The Daily Cartoonist: at that website I can still comment (just with a UserID and my e-mail address), no matter what hardware I am using, including my older iPads and even an ancient PPC Mac: like the Eveready battery or a VW Beetle, it just works.
@ Brian (23) – You may be right. I’m pretty sure that likes are significant, but my observations have been only on simple threads with a very low number of comments (usually without any replies at all). I actively avoid lengthy comment jungles.
Have we all lost our nitpicking tendencies? This post has been up for three days, and nobody has bothered to raise a question about whether the title should have read “Whom do you mean?” :-)
There are plenty of people who do use whom in many of the appropriate constructions, but don’t include this fronted position in WH questions.
For my part I do favor whom for object of a preposition, but just when that relation is visible and explicit in surface structure. The person to whom you are referring has now entered the courtroom. BUT No, we have no doubts about who you are referring to even though some may see a trace of the WH still in object position of the final to. (No, let’s not take the tangent into objections to “stranding” a preposition like that.)
Ahem, change that 2nd example to no doubts concerning who you are referring to, since the version with about raises the fascinating but irrelevant phenomenon of “faux PP [prepositional phrase]” in surface structure affecting the who/whom choice, as the WH word does sort of “feel like” it could be object of about — and distract the argument from its relation to the final to.
@ guero (24) – Thanks for the tip re: “SFPC“. The trick turned out to be the exact form of the search term, GoComics produces a very sizable collection if you look for “Super-Fun-Pak Comix” (using two hyphens and one space).
Super-Fun-Pax Comix are an occasional feature of Tom the Dancing Bug. The individual strips on GoComics are extracted from the TtDB original collections. So Tom the Dancing Bug is the place to look for collections.
The most recent one was August 9: https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2024/08/09
Kilby (28): 🥲 You’re right, of course, but such nitpicking can get lost among the many egregious examples.
Kilby (27): A PPC Mac! Wow! Just last week, I had to replace my 2018 MacBook Pro due to the death of its motherboard (funeral services still pending). I was surprised to find that its digital drive was integrated into the motherboard, so all its data were gone. Then I discovered that my last backup had been three months earlier. Sigh.
Kilby (26): Adding to the browser dependency is the AdBlock factor. I have an ad blocker (Pie) on Chrome, I don’t think I have one on Safari, and I know I don’t on Firefox or Vivaldi.
I’m pretty sure that likes are significant, but my observations have been only on simple threads with a very low number of comments (usually without any replies at all).
As an example, Sunday’s Dick Tracy had two comments with a number of replies. One was a brief one about hitchhiking, and the other a personal message. The former had a fair number of replies early, but few likes. The latter had a larger number of likes and a growing number of replies.
It wasn’t until the latter exceeded the reply count of the earlier one that it took over as Featured. Even when they were even in replies, the tie-breaker seemed to be which was posted at an earlier time.
The reason I’ve disappeared is that I stopped being able to comment, and still can’t without going to a fair amount of trouble. (If then. If this post never appears, then I can’t at all…)
“The person to whom you’re referring” and “The person who you’re referring to” are different transformational syntax transforms and it’s common to accept both. Or even to generate both. I find a lot of these things vary depending on who I’ve been talking to or what I’ve been reading recently.
@ Dave in Boston – Thanks very much for making the effort to come back. It’s been just over a year, but if you can, please let us know what was (or still is ?) causing your problems with the CIDU commenting system. We can’t help much with hardware and/or browser incompatibility issues, that’s WordPress’s fault (as I said above @26, I suffer from this problem, too), but if you are having login issues with WordPress (or Gravatar), we can at least examine the path and see whether improvements can be made.
Dave, I was similarly stuck in a cycle of commenting difficulty. I don’t have a clear report of the reasons, but I think it started when I gave in to the most restrictive criteria and made myself a (free) WP account so I could comment at CIDU and elsewhere by signing into my very nominal WP account.
Which was fine… For a while. Then somehow this came into conflict with how I was signing in to my browser, which thereafter would grab me up from the CIDU or other site Commenting form and try to have me sign in to my WP account, which somehow it couldn’t do without retracting the browser sign in. Or something like that – you can see I have not conquered the system.
What I’ve been doing instead is just to bypass the WP identity. I still have to use the commenting form and fill in an email and posting name. So I started using variants on my address and name, which were not associated with a registered WP account – so it stopped tossing me over to a password-using separate login page.
The only dubious aspect may be that when I first tried varying my address, I just dropped a digit and typed in an email that does not really exist . Or at least doesn’t reach me. So if the CIDU editors are trying to reach me by email over something about my comments, they won’t succeed using this recent, false, address.
And I might add, I have been helped by a feature on the latest version of the commenting form, which is a checkbox saying retain my info for next time. Which it does some of the time, and lets me avoid remembering to create the same email and name.
Kilby –
I am another old software user. I don’t like change and like what I have – this drives husband crazy sometimes.
My main (desktop) computer is running Win 7. If that is not old enough, some of the software I like – such as Lotus Organizer – will not run in same. He setup a Win XP virtual machine for me on that computer so I could use older software on that computer. My Palm Centro and Lotus Organizer get along quite along and sync well with each other in the virtual machine.
At some point I needed a new laptop as the old one(s) I had were running Win XP, so we bought this one – it is Win 10 and also has a WinXP virtual machine.
When tax season comes I have to work on my laptop to prepare returns with the software I use as it won’t run in Win 7.
(This is why we are still together after all these decades – I need him for my computer maintenance and he needs me for housework – maybe I should do some cleaning soon – I am doing the laundry as I post. :-) )
The problem is that this fancy-schmancy textbox thingy doesn’t work in any of my usual browser setups. Nothing much can be done about it if WP upstream doesn’t care if people can access their site, which they evidently don’t.
I can install more browsers in more security containers, but the de facto result then is that opening the thing is too much activation energy so I end up never posting anyway. :-|