The New Yorker has a feature called Laugh Lines. The challenge there is to place several cartoons in chronological order. We’re going to play a version of this with pairs of cartoons that appear in the CIDU archives. Each pair will be from the same comic, so style will be a clue. The link with the letter points to the original posting here at CIDU. The years aren’t that far apart, because they only go back to when Bill had to restart the site. I’ve added a couple at the end that aren’t from the CIDU archives and are farther apart.
JMcAndrew sends in this old Beetle Bailey: “I collect vintage advertising and I am very aware of the crimes against humanity committed with aspic Jello salads.”
He also sent in a bit of vintage Jello advertising:
You may wonder about that fish. Fish in Jello? But some years ago your editor worked for a US pet food company, and we wanted to see what pet foods were sold in other countries that we might sell here. One we had shipped in from Australia was “Pilchards in Aspic”, essentially small herrings in a gelatin matrix, sold as a cat food. We passed on this one.
from Wikipedia: “By the 1950s, salads became so popular that Jell-O responded with savory and vegetable flavors such as celery, Italian, mixed vegetable, and seasoned tomato. These flavors have since been discontinued.”
JMcAndrew sends this in: “Firstly writing a memo asking for a tooth check is still pretty insane. Wouldn’t this be called an oral or dental exam and be performed by an actual dentist?
Also this isn’t what I expected a toot check to be. This could have been a much more interesting comic if they had the platoon taking turns farting in his face. [probably wouldn’t have made it past the comics editors then -ed.]
Maybe this is why the US army has a mandatory retirement age of 64 for senior officers?”
Ah, but those of us who worked in any bureaucrazy are well aware of something apparently nonsensical coming down from above. Is that really what they meant? Should we just do it as requested, or kick it back up for clarification? How many times can you question the bureaucrazy without getting labelled as a troublemaker?
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.
