Month / January 2025

by phsiii

9CL is twice again baffling

Thanks to Mark H.:

These were separated by five days (12/26 and 1/1), but the intervening strips didn’t seem to help.

Mitch suggested “I think there is supposed to be a confusion-of-twins plot going on” but I’m still lost. And Mike mooted “I think newspaper editors have just decided to give 9CL a permanent pass”, which might well be true, but surely Brooke had something in mind!?

by zbicyclist

Thirty Years Ago …

Here’s some current comics as they were posted on January 16, 1995

Baby Blues is still building that family.

Big Nate is easily recognizable, without much change.

Arlo and Janis look a big younger, but otherwise the same.

FoxTrot was still in dailies.

I wanted to check Gasoline Alley, which is famous both for being long-running and for aging the characters. But they’ve switched syndicates over time, and I got the message “Gasoline Alley started on April 8, 2001”.

by phsiii

Must maintain standards

It’s the poodle that stumps me. I know what a standard poodle is–friend had one, bog-standard except for floppy ears option (also uncharacteristically dumb as a post: it would frequently sleep under the kitchen table, then wake up and run headlong into a table leg). But what makes this a SUBstandard poodle? I do like the biscuit-shaped phone case!

by phsiii

The New Yorker maintains its streak

…of being often incomprehensible:

I know what “spoon” means here, but???

This is a scan of a page my sister found in my parents’ house after they passed, with a note from my dad:

The summer I was six I was sent to camp for about six weeks. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it wasn’t really bad. The best part, of course, was leaving to go home. My mother came in the Model A touring car and fetched me at the end of August. The camp was in Maine, not too far up into that state, and we were headed for Arlington, Massachusetts, where we were living with Aunt Fawny and her children.

Our travels took us along the seashore for a considerable distance, first the coast of Maine, then the small amount of New Hampshire shoreline, and finally the ocean north of Boston. Throughout the journey I clamored to get out and go swimming in the ocean, but it was rainy almost the whole way.

My mother promised, though, that if the rain stopped we could go swimming. Finally, when we were nearly home in Arlington, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. Filled with camp spirit I let out a cheer: “Two, four, six, eight; Who do we appreciate; God! God! God!”

My mother thought this was very cute and told it to all her friends. One of them wrote it up and sent it to The New Yorker, which published it. When Mother died I found that December 1933 copy of The New Yorker among her possessions.

Kinda neat. The cartoon happened to be on that page. Curiously, in TNY’s version, my dad’s name was Roger and it was ice cream he wanted, not a swim. Doesn’t matter to the punchline but I’ll always wonder if the details got lost in transmission, or some editor needed to assert his [presumably, in that era] power.