by zbicyclist

A few bugs in the system?

I’m guessing GoComics accidentally posted a prelim version of this comic, and then because it was Sunday didn’t replace it. But if anyone wants to fill in some dialogue, feel free!

As I write this (2/20, 11:30am) it still hasn’t been fixed, although the author commented yesterday that GoComics had been contacted. Update: fixed as of 2/21, 5pm.

Oddly enough, it seems that they’ve also retroactively messed up the previous two Sundays (because there are no comments on that one indicating anything is missing, and I remember reading these previously).

by zbicyclist

Double Geezer Alert

So, what holiday is Nancy refusing to appear on, on February 22, 1950?

Some choices:

  1. My parents welcomed me into the world. I’m sure it felt like a holiday to my Mom, after a 3 day labor. As I am now a Geezer, that’s Geezer Alert #1. Bushmiller was probably unaware of this.
  2. It was also Ash Wednesday, which it is also is today. That’s more of a holy day (but not a Holy Day of Obligation) than a holiday, though.
  3. February 22 was then the national holiday of Washington’s Birthday, until that was moved to the third Monday in February in 1971. That’s over 50 years ago, so that’s Geezer Alert #2. And, while the national holiday is officially Washington’s Birthday, it’s more commonly known now as Presidents’ Day.
  4. Lastly, if we were asking a ten year old George Washington what day he was born, he would have said February 11, 1731, not February 22, 1732. The British Calendar Act of 1751 to adopt the Gregorian calendar was applied retroactively to some dates, changing both the day and the year. Therefore, the fact that this was rerun on January 31, 2023 seems appropriate.
    • Why would they have changed George’s birthday? The answer may lie in this passage from the British Calendar Act of 1751: “no Person or Persons whatsoever shall be deemed or taken to have attained the said Age of one and twenty Years, or any other such Age as aforesaid, or to have completed the Time of such Service as aforesaid, until the full Number of Years and Days shall be elapsed on which such Person or Persons respectively would have attained such Age, or would have completed the Time of such Service as aforesaid, in case this Act had not been made”. To make the proper calculation of when young George would turn 21, his birthday had to move.

That’s your (over)dose of trivia for today.

by phsiii

Comics-world News

(Not “Comics World News”, which would be news about comics that spans the world, rather than news ABOUT the world of comics)

Spotted in Randy Cassingham’s This Is True (née This Just In, changed many years ago after SNL’s lawyers got on his case):

So Long to cartoonist Chris Browne, who took over the “Hägar the Horrible” strip from its creator, his father Dik, when Dik died in 1989. Chris wrote and drew the comic until he died, on February 5, at 70.

Some may recall that Dik Browne also created Hi and Lois, which I’d forgotten (if I ever knew).

Some nice coverage (and no, I don’t know why only the one got a preview–it did even when it wasn’t first):

Chris Browne, long time cartoonist of Hägar the Horrible, has died

https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/local/2023/02/16/hagar-the-horrible-comic-cartoonist-chris-browne-dies-sioux-falls/69899983007/

https://comicbook.com/comics/news/chris-browne-hagar-the-horrible-cartoonist-dies-at-70/

https://www.keloland.com/keloland-com-original/hagar-the-horrible-a-family-story/

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, February 19th, 2023

Here are two from dollarbill (and a third one we happened upon) with the 4th-wall or meta- theme of characters knowing they’re living in a cartoon. He mentions he has been “wading through J. C Duffy‘s humongous almost daily blog posting of comic/photos/short musings beside them sometimes,” which go back years. “Fusco Brothers is just one of his outputs.  The number of fly-in-the-soup  variations is staggering.” CIDU has sometimes featured Duffy’s Lug Nuts, somehow strikingly different in graphics appearance yet very recognizably his work.

Does this make you feel like Dark Side of the Horse is by now influencing successor generations?

Although most cats manage without mechanical mousetraps.

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”.

by EditorM

There it goes!

Thanks to Brian in STL for this puzzling case of “either you know it or you don’t” from Heart of the City. Brian and your editors all were in the don’t-know bucket, but the bit was illuminated by comments in the GoComics site.

Please refrain from posting spoiler answers before, shall we say noon? Though you can get your licks in by just saying you got it.