Category / Asynchronicity

by Kilby

Astronomical Golfing Errors

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.

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 Kilby

A Nasal Asynchron-Ewwwcity

There’s nothing very mysterious about this Wallace the Brave strip (it does help to be familiar with Spud’s somewhat odd personality):


However, that strip reminded of a “Win, Lose, Drew” comic from mid-December:


I seriously doubt that Drew Litton was referring to a specific player, but most of his comics do refer to current sports events. Were there an unusual number of overly “picky” offsides penalties this year? Or was there some other football incident to which this comic is referring?

by Kilby

Rebranding a Lead Balloon


This Rhymes with Orange strip might have worked perfectly back in early summer, but now it just seems awkward. The new corporate name just isn’t easy to adapt into usable slang, and even if it were, the political deadweight surrounding the takeover and renaming ruins any possible remaining humor.

In a curious instance of personal asynchronicity, it wasn’t until a couple of hours after I had written the text above (including the headline) that I saw Sunday’s Doonesbury, which needs no further commentary:

by EditorM

Do the mash

I felt sure CIDU had somewhere printed this Bizarro:

But apparently not. It must have felt familiar because I had seen it the previous week in several places already (email, CK, Wayno’s blog, Piraro’s blog, …). But apparently not right here on these pages.

Why was I looking for it? So that I might drop into a comment on whatever post or thread the Bizarro appeared in, this 1991 Far Side, featuring the same deadly weapon, appearing just recently on the current Far Side archive site.

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by Kilby

Repetitive asynchronicity

I don’t mind an occasional re-run, but it gets a little more interesting when an artist decides to re-draw a strip.

Here’s the Non-Sequitur from Valentine’s Day, 2023:

It seemed awfully familiar, and I soon discovered that Wiley had already done a strip with exactly the same joke (1-Nov-2019):

(This time on All Saints’ Day, which doesn’t seem quite as appropriate.)

The really weird thing is that Wiley had already done exactly the same strip (but in monochrome) a full twenty years before (26-Jan-1999):

Either Wiley is completely forgetting his own archive, or he is being unusually careful about getting this joke “perfect”.