Repeating one of Bill Bickel’s Memorial Day posts.
Author / CIDU Bill
The Sultan Gets Swatted [OT]
Kilby writes: I have no idea where Bill found this image, but he saved it in a miscellaneous draft back in 2019, and I figured that it would be appropriate to post it on the 100th anniversary of the event:
Bill was a dedicated baseball fan; he later said that he would have been interested in seeing an amateur game during his visit to Berlin in 2017, but in retrospect it would have been very difficult to find one (then or now).
P.S. In recent baseball news, The Daily Cartoonist posted a nice (if slightly repetitive) collection of cartoons commemorating the death of Willie Mays.
Peeling out too fast
Kilby writes: this is another old draft post that CIDU Bill set up, but never completed. Even though the strip was originally published in November (2018), I thought it would work better if summer vacation were at least on the horizon, if not actually started.
Comparative Ratios
Kilby writes: This is another comic that CIDU Bill drafted in 2019, but never actually posted. I think most readers will get it pretty quickly, but I have to admit that it took me a moment before I figured out the point; perhaps the same thing happened to Bill as well.
Circle of Ice
Kilby writes: This “Wizard of Id” strip was taken from an unnamed draft post that CIDU Bill created in 2019. I initially thought that it was supposed to be a reference to the song “Circle of Life” (from Disney’s “The Lion King”), but comparing the guard’s dialog with the song’s lyrics did not produce a satisfactory match.
Am I missing something, or does anyone have a better suggestion?
Shadow Boxing
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.
Advertising Blunders
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.)
Ben and His 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“).
Understand it, I do (not?)
Kilby writes: This is another one of Bill Bickel’s “vintage” draft posts from 2018. Back then, Bill once wrote that his interest in Star Wars completely terminated after the original trilogy, so perhaps he was not aware of the significance of the inverted word order, but he also commented that “Okay, even I know who Yoda is! … Yoda’s cat on the other hand…“
P.S. I originally scheduled this for the seventh anniversary of “Rogue One“, but it got bumped to make space for the Saturday OYs. In any case, seeing as Yoda didn’t appear in that film at all, it’s clearly more appropriate to schedule it for the fourth anniversary of “The Rise of Skywalker“. Star Wars fanatics are free to discuss which of those two films they liked better; Bill’s answer would of course have been “neither“.
Time to Cash In?
This comic is dated 2017 (before the CIDU server meltdown sometimes referred to as “comicgeddon”), but Bill must have retrieved it later for a new draft. The original song was released 68 years ago today, back when he was not quite half a year old.
Comics I Don't Understand 