Category / (Not a Cidu)

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – May 18, 2025

Usual John calls out to Geezers: “Any reference to Little Lulu, which stopped publication in 1984, is pretty much for geezers, but Dell did not publish the title after 1962 and John Stanley stopped working on it around 1959.”

This reminds me of a fine example of resume enhancement.

I was preparing to interview a candidate who was getting an advanced statistics degree from Northern Illinois University, a respectable institution. He had a link to his website, so I checked that before the interview, and saw that all across the top of the page he had a large picture of himself in front of the building housing the statistics department … at Northwestern, a very respectable institution.

When asked about that, he said, “I was on the faculty at Northwestern”. And, sure enough, he’d listed a faculty job at CTD, Northwestern. As it happens, I knew that CTD stood for the Center for Talent Development, a summer program for middle schoolers and high schoolers on the Northwestern campus. My daughter had attended that for some summers; the instructors were good, but not regular Northwestern faculty. In fact, my daughter was one of the instructors herself one summer. So, he’d actually taught a group of middle schoolers math during one summer, and had expanded this into being on the faculty at Northwestern.

He did not get a job offer.

by zbicyclist

Poorly drawn, or efficient?

They don’t draw them like this anymore. This is a Rex Morgan from 1955.

Or this Buz Sawyer from 1977:

Jef Mallet has some thoughts on the subject (July 10, 2021):

Stephan Pastis and I have been friends quite a while — both Frazz and Pearls Before Swine were in development at the same syndicate at the same time and launched one right after the other in 2001. Stephan occasionally teases me in his strip, mostly via Jef the Cyclist, and once in a great while I tease him back.

Pearls has been a great success. It’s well earned, and I’ve never been jealous of that success. But I have, occasionally, wondered why I was putting all that effort into posing, composing, positioning and shading my characters when, apparently, it’s not really all that necessary. Perhaps an experiment was in order.

So there you go. If nobody notices today, I can forgo the detail work. On the other hand, I’ve already learned from the experiment that it doesn’t save me that much time. It just saves me time spent shading, which then gets poured into other busy work. In other words, I have a problem, but it’s my problem and I might as well make the most of it.

Without shading:

Previous day:

and this recent one — which shows he kept shading (and brings us back into CIDU territory):

Terry Beatty’s 2025 Rex Morgan has a lot less detail than the 1955 version, but still a lot more detail than, say, Pearls Before Swine, as befits a strip that’s still a continuing story rather than a gag strip.

by phsiii

It’s a miracle!

JMcAndrew sends a set of related cartoons:

The last two are obviously just different versions of the same joke from the same cartoonist, even if they’re 14 1/2 years apart. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or not.

These all remind me of an axiom I was taught long ago as a relationship test: Have lunch at your prospective partner’s house and ask for mayonnaise. If they present Miracle Whip–especially if they aren’t even apologetic about it–RUN.

Miracle Whip is to mayonnaise as carob is to chocolate. As someone else once wrote, “Carob is not an acceptable substitute for chocolate. It is not an acceptable substitute for anything except, perhaps, brown shoe polish.”

by zbicyclist

CIDU’s Swimsuit Issue

It’s May 2, the average day of the last frost here in lovely northern Illinois.

Pools and beaches aren’t open yet, but JMcAndrew sends in some Hi and Lois swimsuit comics to get us in the mood: “Here are several Hi and Lois comics about swimsuits, some of which are just very bizarre. It’s apparently been a theme since the very early days of the comic.”

by zbicyclist

Time Warp

We’ve de-emphasized synchronicities, but Dirk the Daring sends this one in that’s too odd not to post.

These are the same joke showing up as vintage Comics Kingdom on the same day, but the original Barney Google and Snuffy Smith is from November 15, 1938, and the original Beetle Bailey is from October 9, 1956, leading Dirk to note “Given the coincidence, it makes me wonder just how often this joke has been used in the last 100 years.”