I sort of get the point. The drummer’s point of view concentrates on the business at hand. It includes, but blurs, the crowd of audience … even when there wouldn’t be one. And the beach ball the crowd is tossing around .. in all scenes?
Okay, this is a rock/pop/jazz band drummer, not a marching band drummer or marching army drummer — but the title is phrased in terms of marching, so that we would have an excuse to enjoy these performances of the same song. Same song, different drum.
Thanks to Boise Ed for noticing and sending in this pairing!
From Mark M, who says “I was good until the last panel.”
The term “kill-o-rant” in the first panel is not meant to be an additional mystery, just something with a background that wasn’t explained again right here. For the curious, here was the previous weekday strip where the term was coined:
Thanks to “👓 caren” for sending it in, and saying “my friends and i have only the slightest idea what vic might have ingested to publish this… perhaps we need a little to understand it… :)”
This started out for me as simply a complete CIDU:
But a comment on the Comics Kingdom site clarified the basic “what’s going on, what’s the main intended joke?” issues: he’s lost his shot glass inside the patient.
But that just raises soooo many more new questions! Does the Assisting Surgeon (the person speaking) seriously think loss of the shot glass is the only reason the Surgeon is trying to recover it? Wouldn’t he be hugely in hot water when the glass shows up on some X-Ray someday? And what was a shot glass doing in the OR anyway? And did he seriously have just one good one, important enough to make a good birthday present?
Darren notes that only one subpanel is CIDU-level puzzling. “Friday’s Wrong Hands is pretty straightforward to me for all the elements except for xenon. I know of xenon used in lamps and as spaceship fuel, neither of which would seem to hide an elephant. Is there a pun or a pop culture reference that I’m missing?”
And while that was indeed the Friday Wrong Hands on GoComics, their own newsletter had a different cartoon on Friday, which as it happens is also pachydermic.
Thanks to Peter T for sending this in, and saying “I don’t know what the ‘microbeads’ are. Is this some sort of sex joke?”
Republishing this post, so that the site front page will have some comics, instead of the discussions of the domain name difficulties. But an update on those has been posted to
And if it goes to the Site Comments thread but doesn’t jump to that right comment, just click on the notation of “402 comments” on the page.
The Bliss humans may be getting a bit more adventurous in their romantic possibilities, as RHP noted in regard to the first example below. They ask “Is this Harry Bliss comic really suggesting a kinky three-some? It was in a family newspaper (The Boston Globe) on Sunday, Jan. 23, 2022. I notice that it is not showing up on the artist’s website or other comics websites, so I wonder if other editors recognized it as inappropriate.”
Then about a week later, we note the following.
Comics I Don't Understand 