Category / Rerun

Same thing as “Reprint”?

by Kilby

More Repetitive Asynchronicity

Over a year ago I posted a set of Non-Sequitur comics in which Wiley had repeated the exact same joke (including some lengthy dialog) in three different versions. The following examples from Tom Wilson’s “Ziggy” aren’t nearly as sophisticated, but the identical setups seem to show that the author has either forgotten the own material, or simply doesn’t care (“…just run it again, readers will never remember it…”)

All three of these were created by “Tom II” after his father retired, so it’s not a case of a legacy artist not knowing what the original author wrote: he did these all by himself.

Just three years later, with new artwork, but exactly the same joke, word for word:

Sixteen years after that, a new rendition (and now in color), but it’s still the same gag:

I’m sure that it is difficult (effectively impossible) to remember every single joke over a span of 18.5 years (and over 6800 comics), but insulting Ziggy as “shorty” is something of a running gag (besides these three, I ran into half a dozen other examples), so perhaps reviewing the GoComics archive might have been a good idea. That’s exactly why somebody has been going to all the trouble of making sure that the dialog is included in the GC index.

by EditorM

(Recovered suggestion box item) Diamonds are for a while

In January of 2018 CIDU Bill implemented a Contact form page*, and during February 2018 a few readers used that form to send in their suggestions for cartoons to run and analyze on CIDU. We recently stumbled on that cache, and will be running three.

Thanks to timharrod for suggesting this Mutt & Jeff. He notes ‘The price of the earrings changes and the “joke” seems to be “You want good thing? Well, you get bad thing” with no wit or twist.’

BTW, this “printing” at GoComics was from 2018, but the original seems to be 1991, not some ancient run of Mutt & Jeff. I now forget what we decided was the way to use these similar tags, but I’m calling this Rerun rather than Retro or Classic.

*Original Contact form now at https://cidu.info/contact/ . Updated Suggest-A-CIDU form page now at https://cidu.info/suggest-a-cidu/

by EditorM

Still looking familiar …

When elGeo saw yesterday’s “Why does this look familiar?” thread, and also saw the current Pardon My Planet, he wanted to create a “Department of Self-Plagiarism” to hold all these. Because the PmP was a clear repeat with minor variation of a 2015 PmP he remembered well, and had liked at the time.

The one elGeo remembered, and sent in:

And yesterday’s:

Assuming we’re all familiar, at least in its outlines, with the O. Henry short story “The Gift of the Magi”, this post is still a CIDU — for questions like “Why change it from a watchband to a belt?”, not to mention “Does a re-purposing come off better than a simple rerun?”.

But wait, there’s more! You say the change of format from squared-off to landscape necessitated a belt longer than the watchband had been, to fill the frame? Well, no: the belt is not shown stretched out horizontally, it just has a downward segment. Further, the comic did not undergo a change of format; it apparently coexists in both on a regular basis. For the GoComics archive delivers this landscape version of the older instance:

by EditorM

Bashful gorilla

Bashful guerrilla gorilla

Does anyone here know the joke about the bashful gorilla? I don’t, and can’t find it upon (an admittedly desultory) search. …

Next question: Did the audience in the 1950s know the joke? Or did some yes but some no? Edit: No, some site said these reruns were from the first two years of the comic strip, hence 1950-51 roughly. But a bit of digital magnification shows the blurry info at the left of the last panel includes what looks like a “1964”. It doesn’t matter much here, but was significant for the “Viet Nam” strip a couple weeks ago.

Next: Or was there never even a particular joke? Was it simply a tease all along? And would that matter? Would the comic strip gag work anyway, and would it be enuff?

by EditorM

And one Veterans Day-After

Camp Swampy may not ever have been a fighting base, but as this shows, they were not entirely outside a world where military conflict was a reality. And we can count all who served as veterans, whether or not they were in active combat or even in a war zone.

This strip seems to be dated 1964, and early enough in that year that “Viet Nam” did not yet mean all of what it would soon take on. Still, isn’t it a bit shocking that this might strike some of its audience as simply funny?