An acknowledgement of using the same joke, about four years later, when the similarity was pointed out. From “Monster Picnic” in June 2021 (hat tip to Why Evolution Is True blog in 2022 where I saw it):
And by David Borchard in The New Yorker in 2016:
What I mean by “second-order synchronicity” is that Arthur was struck by two different synchro pairs on the same day.
“Barney & Clyde matches with MGG:”
“And Close To Home matches with Off the Mark:”
“Neither are exact matches, but both immediately caught my eye.”
From Chemgal, who was way more scrupulous about synchronicity dating than we would ever demand, asking “Does it count when one is a ‘classics’ strip?”
Two slightly different ways of misusing a common phrase.
A near-synchronicity noticed by Bob Ball. The theme in common might be phrased as “knowing who you should be listening to”, or we can leave it up to the gang to better describe it.
Carl Fink sent in the Loose Parts, which we supplemented with the Lockhorns on a similar motif.
Is it kind of charming that Loretta still has romantic expectations?
Carl says “So, let me ask this question: has anyone seen an actual ‘Tunnel of Love’ at a fair in the past, say, 40 years? Would anyone under that age have any idea what’s going on here? Is that old carnival attraction even remembered now only because of cartoons like this one?”
Also, what is going on? People keep climbing into those boats even though they can see the solid wall and the mounting crashes? Is it almost as much their incompetence as that of the designers of the attraction?
First up, Andréa was struck by the treatment of the old Goofy/Pluto problem, in Pearls Before Swine and Strange Brew:
Next up, Jerry found the focus on Feng Shui in Bizarro and Pickles:
Finally, BillR was seeing jigsaw puzzles all over the place, or at least in F-Minus and Rhymes With Orange:
(This was actually part of a linked series, but seeing the preceding strips wouldn’t make much difference, apart from explaining what might otherwise be a mysterious detail — she was hit in the head by a flying baseball, and is holding an ice bag to it for pain relief.)
And a second shot for Pardon My Planet. This one is a LOL-CIDU. It did take a couple minutes before we got it – but not hard enough to justify making it a separate CIDU post. Also (I confess) it shows the perils of holding on to a negative attitude about some comic strip — one reason I didn’t get it at first was dismissing some meaningful details as merely haphazard artwork.
And a last minute Sunday Bizarro LOL.
Today’s Hi and Lois makes a joke about virtual backgrounds in video app meetings. I’ve seen plenty of video-meeting comics in the last year or so, and maybe a few touching on virtual backgrounds, but this particular one triggered a memory for me:
The memory it triggered was of a MAD Magazine story about fake backgrounds for video calls. The technology it used was “camera phones” — which did exist, but not as an everyday thing generally available to the public — and with fake backgrounds being provided not electronically but as physical backdrops that could be pulled down from a spring-loaded roller, like a certain kind of window shade.
I recalled the piece going thru a series of examples like “Fool your boss”, “Fool your wife”, etc., and finally a “Fool Yourself” where the wrong backdrop was chosen. In today’s cartoon, Hi is almost doing a “Fool Yourself”, if he were using a virtual background but accidentally used a beach or other recreation scene while talking about being in a sickbed or maybe hard at work at his home office.
In trying to track down the MAD piece, my first partial success, with two panels of the MAD story, was at a Peewee’s Playhouse site, in a two-step indirection story that I didn’t entirely follow. But that gave me the 1957 date and the name of the artist, George Woodbridge.
That led soon enough to a Tumblr for MAD fans, and this full image of the original piece!
Two aspirational comics spotted by Chemgal:
Comics I Don't Understand 