Category / Bill Bickel
BOO!
This kind of thing might be rare, but does it really cross over to “mean”? When my kids were young — probably the ages of the kids here — I was taking them around on Halloween and the scarecrow on one of the porches (actually the homeowner in disguise) came to life and shouted “Boo!” as the kids rang the doorbell.
Shrieks ensued.
(And this was a whole lot more startling that somebody already dressed as a skeleton removing his fake head)
But once regular heartbeats resumed, everybody thought it was awesome.
A commenter at the GoComics site wrote “there’d be more than one parent calling the police.”
Seriously?
A Bum’s Tale [OT-ish]
If I could draw, I’d do my own version of this story:
When I was in elementary school, “bum” was the go-to Halloween costume for most of the boys.
Then came Halloween, 1964: our parents were away and our grandparents were staying with us. From the Old Country. And old, though in hindsight about the same age I am now.
And my grandmother did not get the whole “dress up like a bum” concept.
And that meant it wasn’t happening.
So on the day of the school’s Halloween parade, my brother and I dressed in the oldest clothing we could get away with, and detoured through a sort of alley filled with dirt and fallen leaves…
… and messed ourselves up the best we could.
(When I was back in town last weekend for my high school reunion, I took photos of the old neighborhood — which hasn’t changed at all, other than more foreign cars and fewer tail-fins — never suspecting I’d be using one of them on the CIDU page a week later)
Geezerbury
These two are more accessible than most, but they got me wondering: does anybody read Doonesbury Classics other than people who followed it during its initial run? Some of the references were impossibly esoteric even when they were current.
Great Pumpkin
Is it plausible that neither Hammie nor Mama Blues knows who the Great Pumpkin is?
Weren’t we just discussing this?
Sometimes I think we need a tag for “The cartoonist thinks it’s a joke, but it’s actually a damn good idea”
Of course, plenty of times we’ve seen ideas like this in comic strips that actually do already exist.
[OT] Interabang
This morning I came across the existence of Interabang Books, which brought three thoughts to mind:
- Is the word itself a Geezer reference?
- Might the concept have had a better chance of catching on if it didn’t sound like something named by a 9-year-old?
- It is a hell of good name for a book publisher, though.
Speaking of reruns…
I came across this while searching for something else. There are, of course, shards of CIDU scattered throughout the Internet.
I still don’t get it, but I suppose I’ll just have to settle for “women in comic strips are really nutty, am I right?”
2009 called…
Seriously, unless they’re publishing reruns this week, this should have gone live more than nine years ago.
And if it is a rerun, I’ll repeat what I’ve said before (my own rerun): syndicates should respect their comic strips enough to pay somebody a few bucks to sift through old comics scheduled for repeat and pull out the ones that are either outdated or otherwise no longer appropriate.
Another idea: cartoonists can place some sort of “do not rerun this strip” notation in the margins of strips they know won’t be relevant ten years in the future (such as the many memorials for Anthony Bourdain).
Comics I Don't Understand 