Category / Fourth Wall

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, April 23rd, 2023

Maybe 2008, but still not an early adopter.

Last week — 4th wall needed for a watching-the-news story. (It’s just the date formatting that makes this look like a panel from the future.)

The joke is somewhat spoiled (or at least delayed) by the way the sightlines are drawn. But it emerges that what sound like rules for a tweenage girl being left home alone are being directed to Baby Bear (the dog); who isn’t agreeing to them.
(And yes, still downloads from WaPo as .AVIF and needs pre-converting.)

And this Wondermark is not really much of a LOL, but it does provide a chuckle, and prompts me to remember encountering another sense of “Bridge club” in some novels of British India (probably Paul Scott) — it was a party with several ethnic groups invited, and intended to bridge the cultural gaps.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, February 19th, 2023

Here are two from dollarbill (and a third one we happened upon) with the 4th-wall or meta- theme of characters knowing they’re living in a cartoon. He mentions he has been “wading through J. C Duffy‘s humongous almost daily blog posting of comic/photos/short musings beside them sometimes,” which go back years. “Fusco Brothers is just one of his outputs.  The number of fly-in-the-soup  variations is staggering.” CIDU has sometimes featured Duffy’s Lug Nuts, somehow strikingly different in graphics appearance yet very recognizably his work.

Does this make you feel like Dark Side of the Horse is by now influencing successor generations?

Although most cats manage without mechanical mousetraps.

by EditorM

Breaking the Fourth

I’m delighted with how the Bizarro  literalizes the idea of the fourth wall.

So then the problem-solvers’ question is “what are we seeing on the left side of the drawing?” And the answer should be “The adhesive side of the wallpaper”.

The contributor sending in the Macanudo points out that it’s a very old joke (probably could be found in Mutt & Jeff 🙂 ), but this is still a very good realization of the idea.

And they pair well because the Macanudo is at the other end of sticking to the metaphorical.

P.S. Wayno prepares two versions of each Bizarro he makes, a squarish panel and a more horizontal strip format. Occasionally in his weekly blog he shows the variation, and in the week covering this cartoon it was the one getting that treatment. Here is that alternate image:

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, August 28th, 2022

A mordant bit of meta.

Are all of them possible “jumpers” in their own contexts?

Here’s that Sad-LOL promised in the Tags.

And from DollarBill, a Fusco Brothers LOL with some Meta or 4thWall aspects:

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, June 19th, 2022

Okay, is it missing a beat, or brilliantly leaving unsaid, that Martin changes his mind because the patron reveals he is preparing to use highlighter or underline if he doesn’t have Post-Its?

Thanks to Boise Ed for sending this in and noting how it does “clever damage to the fourth wall”.

And a nice plus here is that Percy was not brought in just for this meta moment, but in following days has some entirely non-meta joke conversations with Clayton.

by EditorM

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, April 3rd, 2022

This Far Side link for the snake crossing cartoon is not going to last very long.

Thanks to Kilby for sending this one, and saying “This is the best 4th-wall joke I’ve seen in quite a while:”

Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep

The great thing about this is that we understand a couple of important points about how those paintings were made.

by EditorM

Bonus: 4th-wall games

(Scroll to bottom for update with more complete version of the Mister Invincible.)

Cool escape from paradox:

Here it was being tweeted:

(Plus hat tip to Jerry Coyne, who included it at the end of his Saturday catch-all blog entry https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/08/07/saturday-hili-dialogue-346/ )

(And the tweet as an image capture in case the embedding doesn’t work.)

A reply invoking Nancy:

(Tech aside: I wanted to embed just @sipryor’s reply with the Nancy, but since he quote-replies @tramfrau’s tweet it seems to get repeated here, though we have it separately above and don’t need it again.)

The Nancy as an image, in case the Twitter embedding stops working:

As the Twitter thread goes on to observe, the comics have a long and rich history of playing with the borders and frames in interesting ways. But the Mister Invincible is especially clever about identifying a paradox akin to the time-travel puzzles, and then solving it.

UPDATE!

Tuesday 2021-Aug-10

CIDU regular elGeo has discovered, at the interesting Solrad site, a version of this Mister Invincible comic which is more complete — the one we got from Twitter and posted lacks the top and bottom wide panels. (Also corrected in the tags: the artist’s name is spelled Jousselin.) BTW, Solrad’s discussion of Jousselin’s frame-breaking is quite interesting.