In honor of what would have been CIDU Bill‘s 70th birthday, here are a pair of comics that he would never have understood:
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P.S. When I first discovered this strip, I thought that the “60” in the first frame might be a wonderful, serendipitous coincidence, but alas, my math was off by a decade.
Another repeat from June, 2018. A few years ago, I went to see a jazz concert. The leader / clarinet player was a friend. The bass player didn’t show up, so the leader asked us to imagine a bass line being played in the background. I told him this was a blatant appear to our bass-er instincts.
Repeating one of Bill Bickel’s Memorial Day posts.
Robin Bickel provides this holiday update from the Bickel clan. For those of you who are newer readers, or may just want a refresher about Bill, who founded this site, can find it here.
I hope everyone at CIDU is doing well.
Here’s an update on the always entertaining Bickel clan.
Zak is now in charge of all the visual planning for the NY Times business section and does all the hiring and layout for all the business section features. He just got a dog (his girlfriend talked him into it!) so we’ll see what happens with that!
Aaron and Mary Cate are now the proud parents of Hildegard Willa. She’ll be turning 1 at the end of February and she’s already smart and feisty! I’ve included a few photos of their recent trip to Tuscany. (Hildy has already been to Montreal, Portland Oregon, Berkely, Tuscany, Orlando, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York! She is very well traveled and extremely good on airplanes.)
In between grandma time, I’ve been seeing a lot of theater in NYC – 30 pays this year and I’m already making plans for next year. In the spring, Aaron, Mary Cate, Hildy and I will be travelling to London and Scotland.
As always, I’d love to send everyone a holiday card, designed by that art director extraordinary, Zak! So send me your address and a card will wing it’s way to you [RobinBickel_AT_gmail.com]
Bill wasn’t fond of Dave Whamond‘s squirrel jokes in the corner of Reality Check, so I hope he would forgive me for posting this one. [editor, not Robin]
GiP submitted this B.C. strip, which doesn’t really fit into any category. It’s not funny enough for an LOL, and not puzzling enough for a CIDU: all the gag says is that Thor is hard-headed: he’s willing to endure any adversity to catch his fish, including unnecessarily repetitive waves in the first two panels, and ridiculously improbable starfish slapstick in the third panel. Even the destruction of his boat did not deter him.
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I wonder what Clumsy Carp would have thought about this.
P.S. Despite all its weaknesses, here’s a B.C. re-run from exactly two years ago:
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Why the re-run? Discovering this strip in the submissions archive reminded me of a comment that Bill Bickel wrote in May, 2020, and attached to “Dynamo” (01-Jan-2023): “So greetings from Month Three of the Coronavirus Lockdown. I hope everybody made it through okay to the other side.“
Alas: no.
Several years ago, Bill commented upon the unusual frequency of “Grim Reaper” comics, and he even held a contest (called “Deathmatch!“) to prove his point.
For this reason, I suggested scheduling the following comic collection for today, the second (now) fourth anniversary of Bill’s extremely untimely passing, in memory of a dear friend whom we all miss terribly, and who (I believe) would have understood this rather unorthodox memorial presentation in the humorous and good-natured fashion in which it is sincerely intended.
It’s simply a shame that Bill never had a chance to read and comment upon these comics with us all.
P.S. The comments are still open: everyone is welcome to read them and all the comics that were added there (currently seven dozen), and to add new ones.
This Strange Brew was contributed by Andréa, originally as an Oy:
Leigh Rubin keeps on returning to the Grim Reaper theme:
Rather than repeat the elaborate memorial post for CIDU Bill’s birthday, this year I thought we could let one comic say it all:
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.
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.
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.
Comics I Don't Understand 