Thanks to Mark H for sending in this sweet musical 4th-wall comic!
(Technical P.S. – There are emoji(s) in the title, yes. But they do not appear in the “slug” or the URL for this post, so should not wreak havoc with the indexing!)
Thanks to Boise Ed for suggesting this one, and providing the “fifth wall” classification! :-)
McDonnell usually has a theme for each entire week of daily Mutts strips; last week he produced a very nice collection of “meta” and “fourth wall” gags:
As an unusual bonus, the Sunday strip also fits in with the overall topic of the daily strips:
P.S. I decided to fetch the monochrome originals from Mutts.com, in particular because I felt that the Thursday and Friday strips do not work as well in color.
P.P.S. I was very disappointed when Arcamax switched Mutts to the colorized daily strips, and neither Arcamax nor Comics Kingdom bothers to include the title panel for the Sunday strips, which is often a real loss.
A nice LOL-Ewww:
And then a nice LOL-Awwww:
And who doesn’t enjoy a good Alexa-Siri joke?
And an Ouch-LOL:
He meant to order an inflatable doll, but received an inflatable bed of nails.
P.S. A couple days later, this character and that prop re-appear; but decidedly not funny :-( .
BTW, Gocomics gives this feature filenames that look like loesp230927.jpg, clueing us that at some point they were considering it to be Life On Earth in Spanish. (The same artist does the Life on Earth comic.)
Again on the meta train.
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.
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.
Thanks to Phred for sending this in.
The LOL-Yikes (horror) that you were promised, with a dollop of fourth-wall.
And haven’t we been seeing a lot of the Potato Head family of late?
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:
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:
Comics I Don't Understand 