Flagging the third one as a comic fan’s OY, but need to do two earlier ones in the series as a setup:
Mitch4 sends this in:
And while we’re on the subject of Freud, Mitch4 also sends this:
Freud’s unconscious cravings had more to do with sex, if I recall correctly, but there are other unconscious cravings.
JMcAndrew sends this in: “Why does he have the giant poster of a fly to begin with? Is he going to start eating anything vaguely associated with fruit? This isn’t a comic I normally read.”
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.
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.
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.”
Comics I Don't Understand 