They tell you where the answer can be found.
Before consulting that official answer, as a regular Luann reader but not a long-long-term fan, I was able to decode many of the individual clues, but could not give it an overall meaning. How will CIDU readers do, on either level?
All the individual clues decode to the same thing.
It’s a number
At first sight, this was going to be a CIDU. Then it was agreed to be not that puzzling — still, it’s not perfectly clear if it’s just a funny situation idea.
Say, what actually was the reason for Cmdr. Bond’s preference? Do the components get more evenly mixed, or less? Does some air get incorporated? Does it bring out the flavoring of the vermouth? Or hide it?
A geezer theme for sure.
An interesting kind of Meta, that we are flatfootedly calling “LOL-Meta, alluding to an old joke, by forestalling it”. Possibly a CIDU for a few — if you don’t already know what the patient’s question had to have been, by all means venture an idea of it in comments.
Okay, do you agree this belongs in the LOLs? Or would you put it in OY, because the patient’s mishearing error depended on a near-miss similarity of sound between urine and hearing?
Thanks to Chak for this LOL from the Chuckle Bros:
When the New Yorker website has an outage, you see this message.
Hey, just a minute there! Are you saying there’s something wrong with that? It strikes me as an eminently reasonable basis for a preference.
Here is a sampler from recent episodes of an Australian strip that is new on our radar, Insanity Streak by Tony Lopes.
An Awww:
Ooops, accidental repeat! This was already here in the OY list, when the Lard came along and triggered the Thursday quasi-synchronicity post. And we forgot to delete this occurrence.
There was a “Save the Naugas” movement! (Was that the Car Talk bros? Um, no, they were doing “Save the Skeets”.)
Here in the mid-South Side neighborhood around the University of Chicago, we think of this fabled pair as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-Park.
Thanks to Chemgal for sending in this Frazz, a good combo OY/LOL.
For what happens if you mix probiotics and antibiotics, see https://xkcd.com/2177/
Hey, what an interesting odd combo of meta and straight-up OY!
Thanks to Boise Ed for sending in this excellent Mutts, and for calling it a “fifth wall” cartoon!
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!)
This gets extra tags — some kinda Meta for not using the standard joke set up in panel 1, and some kinda Geezer warning for those youngsters who don’t see something familiar behind “Killjoy was here”.
Maybe. My local newspaper (Chicago Tribune) has become an indistinct shadow of its former self, and the comics are shrunken and in black and white.
Despite the “(Not a CIDU)” category applied to this post as a whole, this item may take a bit of concentration and research before you can join in saying “Oh, I’ve got it completely decoded now!”.
There will be no arguing over whether this is truly a “meta” comic!
We think this is a rerun; but if so, then it falls into “an oldie but goodie”.
Here’s the funny-sad one promised in the category tags.
BTW, do they have a walkie-talkie set, or is that a quite old-school cell phone?
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.
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A last few in color again
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And while this post was languishing in Draft queue, there were still good new duffies getting published. This one, for instance, which found its way into one of our weekly OY collections:
.. and prompted this intro: OY by virtue of ambiguous parsing of [[comic strip] bar] versus [comic [strip bar]]. But y’know, as Will Rogers is never quite quoted as saying, I never meta man I didn’t like. And also a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a metaphor?
Or similar for this :
Comics I Don't Understand 