This Six Chix panel, from the Wednesdays chick, Susan C K, is dated this coming Wednesday, 6 March, but was available by mistake last Wednesday, 28 February, when Comics Kingdom released their revamped website, and among several other issues was noticed to be displaying comics planned for up to a week in the future.
Whut? I suppose there could be a problem with the mechanism so that some dampers cannot stay lifted, making the notes from those strings always staccato. But that’s a stretch, and there isn’t a normal sense in which some strings have staccato as a property.
Thanks to Darren for sending this in and commenting —
If it were “Look out. Skydivers”, I’d understand. But that they’re supposed to be BASE jumpers, I don’t get. Does that mean that the angels are down low or that there’s something unseen to jump from up super high? And are the (parachuteless?) wingsuits important?
Every so often we see, or are sent, a comic that has something awry in its setup or presuppositions, and are tempted to run as a CIDU because “I don’t understand how we can proceed from a faulty premise” or something like that. But then on the other hand we, on principle, aren’t here to condemn and cast out any cartoonist or their work.
So, as an outlet for the first impulse, here are some collected examples, of cartoons from sources one certainly respects highly, but contain boners that just demand to be called out.
This is actually pretty funny … once you get past the multiple problems in the setup and the text giving the premise.
But this seems to depend on fission being more dramatically explosive than fusion.
Except there are no imaginary numbers involved!
Okay, it’s no doubt just a typo, but maybe today there isn’t a pass for that. The issue is that Argon is almost exclusively encountered as a gas, never an oil. But there is something called argan oil, currently a popular component of skin and hair products.
The error here is probably noticeable only to someone familiar with the workings of USPS local operations in urban localities. A collection box is the more commonly seen, the mostly blue boxes we call just “a mailbox”, with some kind of opening where anyone can slide in a letter. They will contain mail for anyplace on earth, or anyhow in the USA, and certainly not limited to local destinations. There’s no way the buskids could deliver all that.
The joke could perhaps be saved by making it a [postal] relay box. These are the somewhat larger boxes, in a khaki-green, with no public deposit latch, only a side door with a lock. When a local delivery carrier with a bike or pushcart sets out from the station to begin their route for the day, it would be awkward to have to carry all the mail for the whole route. So it gets broken into two or three stages, and a truck from the station goes around to the relay boxes in the area and drops off the packets for the later stages of the routes being serviced by bike or hand-cart carriers. If the bus in our cartoon had knocked over one of these, the buskids could plausibly have delivered them. (You don’t need to know the route — just “follow the mail”.)
The background story is hard to explain (especially as I have barely followed it myself). Suffice it that — due to some repairs or renovations on their house — this family has been living outdoors in an extended backyard for a long time, variously in tents, or in this treehouse, or in the scrub with local wildlife.
(The one previous appearance of Home Free on CIDU was from the setup of this situation. We didn’t get it then, either.)
And Yay! to the cartoonist for that “Ring Ring Ring” in the first panel! I completely accepted it as a drawing device to indicate the electro-mechanical sound of a phone ringing. But no, it was the wife just saying the words “Ring Ring Ring”. Good job of surprising us with a defeated assumption!
But then tut-tut on showing the string just drooping there slackly! As of the day following the GoComics appearance of this strip, some ninety percent of the comments there are devoted to pointing out that for a “tin can telephone” to work, the string has to be pulled taut between the cans, essentially in a single straight line. (And secondary to this, the attachment of the string with a piece of tape, shown in the first panel, is a rel;ated part of why this setup wouldn’t work — to get the vibrations to transfer, the traditional setup is to punch a small hole in the base of the can, thread the string thru the hole, and tie a knot on the end so it can pull taut.)
Hard to guess whether the cartoonist just didn’t know; or knew but just didn’t think it would matter; or knew but built in an excuse, that they can quite easily hear each other by the sound carrying in the open air, and the tin-can-telephone is just their little joke!
Maybe this should be held until the next time we assemble an Oopsies list post. But even if the wording owes something to bad translation or the author not being a native speaker of English, it’s still hard to guess how anything even somewhat plausibly translatable this way could fuel a story or joke to go with the drawing. Hey, is that even un patito at all?
… who explains: “I understand the point of bread pudding is to use perishable ingredients (e.g. bread, milk and eggs) before they perish. I don’t understand why A & J would keep perishables as their ‘snow provisions’. Suspension of disbelief will only stretch so far.”
Comics I Don't Understand 