Category / Fourth Wall

by zbicyclist

More Fourth Wall

Boise Ed sends this in: “Here’s nother imaginative use of the Fourth Wall idea.”

I seem to remember Dagwood used to talk to the dog for this type of monologue, not directly to the reader.

Boise Ed notes, “You don’t get much more fourth-wall than this one.”

by zbicyclist

Fourth Wall Fun

By one definition, “4th wall comic refers to a comic book where characters become aware of their own fictional existence and address the audience directly. This concept, known as the Fourth Wall, separates the characters from the readers, allowing them to comment on the narrative and its limitations.” By that definition, not all of these fit. In some of these, it’s that the cartoonist lets us acknowledge the cartoonist’s existence, while the characters remain unaware. Is there a separate term that should be used for that?

by zbicyclist

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – July 27, 2025

“They say it’s probably safe to keep orbiting for a while, but if it stays on or starts flashing we might have to call someone.”

Boise Ed sends this in: “I can’t recall ever seeing so clever a use of the fourth wall.”

JMcAndrew sends this in: “I’m assuming Curtis is watching the 1977 schlock horror film “The Incredible Melting Man” which might be the most obscure geezer movie I’ve ever seen referenced in a newspaper comic strip.”

Perhaps some relative of cartoonist Ray Billingsley was in this movie. Billingsley was born in 1957, so he would have been 20 when this was made.

by Kilby

Unbeatable comics!

Boise Ed submitted the French comic “Imbattable” (literally: “unbeatable”), which was suggested to him by a friend, adding: “My French isn’t totally up to this, but … Pascal Jousselin … does some great work with fourth-wall shattering“. Ed intended this strip as a CIHS, but I was astonished to discover that a translated version of “Mister Invincible” had already appeared at CIDU back in August 2021.

March 20th is French Language Day, which seemed an appropriate occasion for these strips to appear in the original version.

The second example is just the first of ten “unbeatable” pages that appeared in an April 2017 review of the first album collection “Justice et légumes frais” (literally: “Justice and Fresh Vegetables”).

…
P.S. Try the link if you want to read the other nine pages in the review.

by Kilby

Pirate Equity from Vulture Capitalists

Boise Ed called our attention to an entire story arc from “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee“, commenting: “This takes the Fourth Wall idea to a new level. Starting with Monday, June 24, John Hambrock had a private equity firm take over the strip, first replacing the furniture and then the characters themselves, to scrape expenses. The daily jokes were (intentionally) pathetic…. Basically, it was a two-week screed against the evils of soulless private equity firms….”

It seems a bitter coincidence that Lee Enterprises has been gutting the comic pages (and publication frequency) for a very large number of newspapers. However, this arc appeared before Lee Enterprises announced a mandatory wholesale switch to King Features (the syndicate that publishes Edison Lee).

Here is a selection of strips, including links to the first and last strip of the arc. Because of the way the Comics Kingdom website works, the best way to read the entire story is to open the last strip, then load additional strips until you get back to the first strip, and then read upwards in the window from the first strip to the last.

P.S. Don’t forget to close that annoying popup frame with the lame Popeye cartoon!

This is the way the arc began:

This was the final strip of the arc:

…
At the end, Boise Ed also asked: “I wonder if [we] will see the old characters comment on that, or if the strip will just resume its version of normalcy.”

P.P.S. The arc was in fact self-contained, without any internal reflection after it was over.