Category / CIDU

by EditorM

Still looking familiar …

When elGeo saw yesterday’s “Why does this look familiar?” thread, and also saw the current Pardon My Planet, he wanted to create a “Department of Self-Plagiarism” to hold all these. Because the PmP was a clear repeat with minor variation of a 2015 PmP he remembered well, and had liked at the time.

The one elGeo remembered, and sent in:

And yesterday’s:

Assuming we’re all familiar, at least in its outlines, with the O. Henry short story “The Gift of the Magi”, this post is still a CIDU — for questions like “Why change it from a watchband to a belt?”, not to mention “Does a re-purposing come off better than a simple rerun?”.

But wait, there’s more! You say the change of format from squared-off to landscape necessitated a belt longer than the watchband had been, to fill the frame? Well, no: the belt is not shown stretched out horizontally, it just has a downward segment. Further, the comic did not undergo a change of format; it apparently coexists in both on a regular basis. For the GoComics archive delivers this landscape version of the older instance:

by EditorM

9 Death and Transfiguration Lane

(This was a recent item in “9 Chickweed Lane Classics” but I can’t tell what year the original publication would have been.)

So, what on earth is that “Tod and Verklarung’s” doing there? As Tod und Verklärung it is the title of an 1889 tone poem by Richard Strauss, always called in English “Death and Transfiguration“. Brooke McEldowney, the cartoonist, certainly intended the allusion — but in what way?

But what is it doing in Edda’s dialog? Is that supposed to be the fictively-actual name of a store in this universe? Or is it her parodic version of a different name, which her mother would recognize? And for the cartoonist, is it coming from “Abercrombie & Fitch”, or some other real store, or thin air? And are we meant to reflect on death and transfiguration?

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Here is a performance of that piece:

Or if you’re feeling very studious, here is a dissection of the music in detail: