Category / Vintage

by Kilby

After Thanksgiving is before Thanksgiving

This cartoon by John Jonik was first published in the New Yorker exactly 41 years ago today, but I discovered it too late to add it to the Thanksgiving collection for 2023.

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The headline above is modeled after a quote by Sepp Herberger, coach of the German national football soccer team: “After the game is always before the [next] game.” Of course, discussing football (of either variety) can sometimes be even more explosive than discussing politics.

Mark H. submitted this XKCD (#2858) last year; although it did get embedded in comments (such as in the No-Politics Zone), it’s still worth a repeat in a post:

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P.S. The “mouseover” or “title” text reads: “An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.“

P.P.S. The link to the HuffPost article in the second panel still works (I already typed it in, so that you don’t have to).

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In Germany, it’s called “Erntedankfest” (literally: “harvest thanks festival”), and is celebrated on the first Sunday in October, but it is primarily an event for the liturgical calendar (both Catholic and Protestant), and is not (generally) celebrated by families at home.

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Several decades ago, my grandmother just happened to include a leftover bowl of (homemade) mac&cheese on the Thanksgiving dinner table, which resulted in some amused needling from my dad and uncle. However, both my sister and my aunt vigorously defended it, so that for many years thereafter, (fresh) mac&cheese became a standard component of my grandmother’s Thanksgiving menu.

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The final panel reminded me of the last scene in the song “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.

No cranberries? Frank and Ernest have suggestions:

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, August 04th, 2024

Back in May, Mark H. wrote that “This [Shoe] caught me completely off guard“.
Perhaps it will do so again in August?

Wait a minute! Doesn’t the “you had me at” trope use something the other party said *early* in their dialogue turn?
Here’s the same comic in single-panel format. These get published under the name “Reply All Lite” and have become re-arrangements (sometimes radical) of the same day’s horizontal-format and usually multi-panel strip. The single-panel “Lite” series used to be somewhat more separate, with a less verbatim relationship to the strip version. The new approach strikes me as sensible. Note that it pretty much coincides with her move to distribution via Counterpoint.

Nope, I’m not sure I would have recognized the title characters if they weren’t named.

And it’s remarkable that they were able to hire domestic services from Amazon even way back then!

by CIDU Bill

The Sultan Gets Swatted [OT]

Kilby writes: I have no idea where Bill found this image, but he saved it in a miscellaneous draft back in 2019, and I figured that it would be appropriate to post it on the 100th anniversary of the event:

ruth

Bill was a dedicated baseball fan; he later said that he would have been interested in seeing an amateur game during his visit to Berlin in 2017, but in retrospect it would have been very difficult to find one (then or now).

P.S. In recent baseball news, The Daily Cartoonist posted a nice (if slightly repetitive) collection of cartoons commemorating the death of Willie Mays.

by EditorM

“Papa Knows” at Obscurity of the Day

The estimable Allan Holtz, comic strip historian and proprietor of The Stripper’s Guide, has invited CIDU readers to join in trying to make sense of these example panels from the vintage series Papa Knows. He provides an historical deep-dive and some interpretive overview in last Friday’s blog column, in the Obscurity of the Day series, but leaves these four as examples where it seems no genuine attempt at a gag can be found. — What we like to call Comics I Don’t Understand!

(As Allan explains, “Obscurity of the Day is just posts about rare and overlooked newspaper comics; generally speaking if they’re hard to understand it’s because of the gulf between our time and theirs. Papa Knows, on the other hand, seems to be downright weird no matter when you might have read it!”)

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – March 30th, 2024

I mistook those candles in the background for cat-hair rollers!

And the pun factor is: how about some gin or vodka?

I’m a little dubious how “went on the wagon” works out here. But let it be noted, there are probably several cities with drinking establishments called Crow-Bar or Cro-Bar.

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – March 2nd, 2024

And another Argyle Sweater, this one from Targuman.

If you enjoyed that one, you may already know about the “Peccavi” incident.

The movie on which this joke is based was released in 1977: 47 years ago. Ordinarily, that would qualify for a Geezer tag.

by EditorM

Fresh

GoComics is running some vintage “B.C” under the title “Back to B.C.”. This strip is from 1966 and seems to be in sequence with others from that time.

But a previous strip already used up the pun on “fresh” to mean mildly impolite, sassy. So, what is this one getting at? Is “floating upside down” still a sign of “fresh” behavior? Or just avoiding being purchased?

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