Don’t understand how they get away with it

Thanks to Dana K for this Today’s Szep. The main joke is easy enough: the mere unlikely existence of this rack and these categories of card message. But what is all that ancillary action supposed to be about? Do these two know each other? Or is the woman just a judgemental bystander? Is she saying something, or just standing there with her jaw dropping?

On the first hand, this seems to me an excellent job of working out a technical experiment in the art of cartooning. Color-coding the speech bubbles could represent an improvement on trying to aim the pointers with precision, or stretching them around, or finding a basis for making the comic multi-panel so the dialogue can be rearranged.

But OTOH, the content of the dialogue is miles away from being at all funny. And is not even folk-wise, in that pseudo-deep way Frazz is so fond of trying.

Here’s a *FoxTrot* sent in by **Kilby** for the Oopses list. He says there is a real-world chronology error in showing Alpha-bits cereal in a current cartoon scene. “Alphabits was taken off the market in 2006, and made only brief periodic re-appearances, before disappearing again a year ago (May 2021). [Wikipedia link] The reason I checked is that I was not able to find them the last time I visited Washington. It’s possibe that Bill Amend is writing his strips a whole year in advance, but I seriously doubt it.”

Kilby also presents a judgement dilemma. “When a cartoonist recycles an ancient joke (albeit with ‘improvements’), is it better (A) To admit the crime, or (B) Just pretend that nobody will notice how ancient the gag really is?”

(A)