These come from suggestions by Usual John and Jack Applin, both of whom call the 12 December one a cry for help!
From 5 December
From 12 December
Note that, the way the Six Chix rotation works, two comics a week apart will be by the same artist – in this case Bianca Xunise.
Is there a way to interpret these that isn’t dark?
From 19 December
From 26 December
Do we need an anti-geezer alert for this one? I would never have understood this joke a few years ago. Actually, depending on your state, it might be a CIDU still.
This is from June 21, 1966, repeated on December 12, 2023. LBJ is president. Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson are Batman and Robin, but that’s obscure enough without trying to tie it into the national debt.
It’s New Year’s Day, 2024, so why not post some New Year’s cartoons from another NY, The New Yorker? Wait. Wasn’t that yesterday’s theme? But this is a theme so nice, we’re using it twice.
1931 (i.e. first issue of 1931): some wake-up bells to start your year
1930
1932: not a cheerful New Year’s
1933: Roosevelt’s been elected, but not inaugurated. The man here is not hopeful.
1933
Similar theme from 1934:
To all our readers, commenters, editors, and cartoonists who make this possible, best wishes for a wonderful 2023 2024!
Reflect and think? Or maybe just do some things appropriate to the season. Change out that furnace filter that should be changed every 3 months. Is your toothbrush getting too long in the tooth? Check your IRA balances if you’ll need to make RMDs. Check the refrigerator for stuff that expired in 2022. Make some Hoppin’ John with those black-eyed peas in the back of the pantry. Feel free to comment on your own ways to mark (or ignore) the day.
Or, perhaps like Mooch, you’re perfect and can just take a nap.
Let’s end with an OY:
Dirk the Daring sent this one in. Lots of choices: Bat masks? A covid reference a couple of years late? White nose disease?
Is this trying to protect us from the bats, or protect the bats from us?
Or to better adapt the question, Is that supposed to be a real gadget (that one of us might recognize), or an invention of the fantasy brain only?
And while we’re wondering, would a library help desk (or even moreso, a reference desk) offer to help patrons work their own devices? (Beyond providing the netname and password if they offer free wi-fi on the premises.)
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”.)
OK, I see there is some sort of getting-even irony here. But how is it performed? Is there really a diamond bracelet? Who is getting it, if there is one, and how is that a revenge? Or if the oddity is merely due to an omitted “not”, would that mean the husband was expecting to receive a bracelet?
Findus shares
And notes: So the customer looks nothing like the models but is still pleased with the make-up. So what? Or is she buying a distorting mirror? Should I recognise the customer or the person the make-up is evoking?
What is she* taking? And why did a commenter on GoComics make a reference to TinTin? (OK, we have a theory on that one, but is it related to the comic?)
*Based on necklace and shoes; not intended as sexism, though I suppose even making an assumption based on necklace and shoes could be considered sexist. Sue me, I’m 62.
Comics I Don't Understand 