Category / Synchronicity

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

Bonus post: train of association

This is actually a long-running plot thread in Safe Havens: The boy called here “Leo” is also, in his other time and place, going to be Leonardo da Vinci. His education in science and technology as a youth in the modern world will underlie his great talents in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

Does anyone else here look at that and think, “Oh yeah, I remember that speculation coming up in The Door Into Summer!“? That 1956/7 novel by R.A. Heinlein involved quite a bit of plot interactions in different time periods, mostly by means of cold sleep, but with a smidgen of actual time-machine travel. The narrator tracks down an eccentric inventor in his hermitage, and learns about his device. When loaded with equal masses on its two pans, it can send them into other times, one to the past and one to the future by equal time-intervals. He extracts this recollection from the inventor:

The narrator does manage to get sent back from 2001 to 1970 (both of which, I remind you, were part of the unclear future when the book was published). After some plot-heavy manipulations, towards the end of the story he reflects:

by Kilby

The Late Anthropocene

Although CIDU is no longer actively soliciting “synchronicity” submissions, sometimes exceptions must be made. Both of these editorial comics appeared two weeks ago, on Wednesday, April 24th; by coincidence they just happened to be right next to each other in my daily link list (but that was only because of the alphabetical proximity of the author’s names).

P.S. CIDU Bill was exceedingly strict with his requirements for the “synchronicity” tag. They had to be published on exactly the same day, and it was more than just the appearance of an identical object or concept in each comic: the setup or point of the joke had to be the same.

by EditorM

… but nobody does anything about it

Reader Mike Pollock offers a “juxtaposition via T.A.R.D.I.S.” Perusing this Saturday Evening Post comics selection page, Mike thought the way the weather forecast lingo was handled in the two Stan Hunt panels here (from 1950 and 1955) was reflected in the very recent Zits below them.

“Small-craft warnings are being displayed from Cape Hatteras to Sandy Hook.”
Stan Hunt
September 30, 1950
“Try to think of it, dear, as simply a low-pressure system extending from The Great Lakes region into Ohio and eastward to the Atlantic States trapped between two areas to high pressure that…”
Stan Hunt
September 3, 1955

And with our editorial eyes opened to this idea, we were quick to note this Life on Earth: