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.”
Darren submitted this same-day pair, commenting: “Two separate one-panels with a riff on mimes and the right to remain silent.” — they just don’t come more synchronous than this!
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Darren added: “Although in the Loose Parts [on the left], I’m wondering what made him give in. Has the mime just been standing in one spot for over a week or something?“
Chipper 42 submitted these comics nine months ago, commenting that he “saw these one after another” (they were both published on April 4th), but I decided that they could wait until Squirrel Appreciation Day to appear at CIDU.
Brian in StL submitted this pair of “classic crescent-moon outhouses” last year, which seemed eminently appropriate for World Toilet Day.
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P.S. Both of these strips were published last year on October 5th, but the Non Sequitur is actually a rerun from 2019, and was embedded into a comment in that year in Bill’s Halloween post about “Outhouses“.
The same-day parallels were simply too strong to ignore:
Even though they clearly aren’t, I would like to think that these are the same guys:
The following pair was submitted by Chipper 42; today happens to be “Hug a Sheep Day” (make of that what you will: both of these comics were originally published on April 5th).
P.S. While I understand the editorial position that CIDU should not actively solicit “Synchronicity” comics (primarily because the result tends to be far too many mild, random coincidences), I’m not about to ignore a superb example when I see one, especially when there is an ideal date on which to present it.
I think that these comics are closer to EWWWs, but DollarBill submitted them as synchronous OYs, commenting “same day, same theme, juxtaposition next to each other in my GoComics daily feed“. The latter is not surprising, given that the titles are alphabetically adjacent to each other:
Blazek’s comic was a brief CIDU for me, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. If there ever was a feature that GoComics should have renamed for just one day, this was it:
Dan Collins wasn’t taking any chances with misunderstandings: the label on the bubble seems gratuitous and unnecessarily crude, but without it, the color might not have been enough to identify the contents, since he did not indicate the precise location of the source.
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P.S. No matter how it was generated, a bubble that large would have a good chance of capsizing that boat. Aerated water has a much lower density, and cannot support the same weight as normal water, so the vessel sinks. This is a factor with depth charges used against submarines. Even if the explosion itself does not cause a leak, the reduced buoyancy may cause the submarine to fall to a depth where the water pressure is too high, fatally damaging the hull (as happened in the Ocean Gate disaster last year).
Okay, they can have one now and then!
Two driving comics that arrived in my email inbox on the same 06 September delivery. (The Zack Hill was one in a series about Jan’s assignment to anger management school.)
For a while this felt like it should go somewhere in the “All we needed was the first panel” family of picky categorizations. But then it turns out I would have entirely missed the extra pun, were it not for the final panel telling us exactly what we were missing!
Not only were these two published just one day apart, the jokes are identical, as is the fundamental physical impossibility. Neither one would appear to be related to a specific incident or place.
Bill Amend currently lives in Missouri, but Foxtrot isn’t tied to a specific location: “I’ve never established where the Fox family lives and I’m not sure the sort of place I depict really exists. It’s sort of that generic cartoon version of suburbia that a lot of strips share where it snows in the winter and is near water when necessary. I grew up in New England and Northern California, and I think bits of that come through, but it’s nowhere specific.“
B.C. takes place somewhere in Generic Cave Man Land, but Mason Mastroianni lives in upstate New York.
Jack Applin submitted this B.C. strip as a CIDU, noting that “Grog hit the ball to … Saturn? Let’s ignore the [80 minute] light speed delay [one way!]. What is that film around the planet and rings? Atmosphere? But Saturn is a GAS GIANT — all that we see is atmosphere inside the rings!“
The obvious astronomical destination would have been a black hole, but that would have been impossible to convey to readers, and the closest known black hole is 1500 light years away.
My guess is that Mason chose Saturn because it is the only planet that could possibly be recognized in comic strip resolution. Most papers that still print daily comics do so in monochrome, which could seriously deteriorate the carefully shaded images in the first three panels.
P.S. Just a week later, a very similar gag appeared in The Wizard of Id:
Both strips have a long history of using golf gags, but a little more temporal separation between these two might have been advisable.
Comics I Don't Understand 