by EditorM

The getaway trick

From Bob Quixote, puzzled by a cartoon in the New Yorker — as so many of us so often are!

The quixotic one says: I hope you can help me with this cartoon from the latest New Yorker. I’ve been studying it for way too long but cannot figure it out. Why are the cows cops? Is there a hole under the torn-down fence? Why didn’t the robber just hop the fence instead of taking time to take down a section of the fence? Thanks

Phil of the editorial team adds: That’s a cattle guard, common in the West: you can drive over ‘em, but they stop cattle.

by multipleciduers

[Bonus CIDU] Well technically, …

Perfectly good comics. But you have the nagging feeling the joke or pun would work just a tiny bit better if this-or-that could be edited a trifle.
(Thus CIDUs by a polite extension — “I don’t understand why this little matter couldn’t be fixed up…”)

Here, for instance, the traditional form uses “get a haircut / hair cut” and always works smoothly; unlike in this strip, where the dialogue in panel 2 is quite unnatural. “Hey Harv, didja get a hair cut?” , “Nah, I got them all cut! Heh heh!”

A good chuckle from Arlo and Janis, sent in by Jack Applin who has a point about “breaking serve”.

As Jack explains, As I understand it, to “break serve” means to score a point in tennis when your opponent serves. However, Janis was serving (“Did you cover the charcoal fire?”), and Arlo neglected to do that, so Janis scored the point on her own serve, right? Even if we consider the entire strip one long volley, Janis still asked the initial question, so she’s serving.

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 multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – August 03rd, 2024

I had been familiar with the Çedille Records label out of Chicago for quite some time before noticing that one reason for the name is that it would be pronounced much like “CD”.

by EditorM

Still in a mask? … Oh!

This appearance of “Yes, I’m Hot in This” on 29 July 2024 was a return to GoComics after an absence, with the previous publication marked as 06 September 2023. The GoComics comments for this strip were mostly on the “Welcome back!” theme, but with a few addressing the content. Her Patreon describes activities over the past year including an NBA nomination; but only indirectly talks about getting back into drawing cartoons.

(Marking as “Momentary CIDU” because it was a touch confusing at first, but not too hard to decode in general terms.)

No, she’s not a professional hoopster, you philistine!

by EditorM

It’s Insanity Streak, Jake

Thanks to Boise Ed for suggesting this.

The core for Ed of why this may be problematic is whether to take seriously the appearance of a body of water along the bottom border of the drawing, with therefore some air above it. If that casts the main picture as taking place in the air, well that sort of works for seeing the flying fish as actually performing sustained flight in the air. But it is something of a fail in terms of the human diver (with air bubbles!) and the other species of water-borne life — they can’t be understood as up in the air!

But of course that strip along the bottom doesn’t have to be taken as water below air. It could be just a decorative border. Or better, it could be the seafloor, below a water scene.

by Kilby

The difference between the men and the boys…

Tim Harrod submitted this “Wizard of ID” strip, noting that “…the writer seems to think that Moses was a wizard“. I sure hope that the theology in B.C. isn’t starting to leak over into the Kingdom of Id.

I think the joke in the final panel is clear, but I don’t understand the gag in the second “throwaway” panel, unless it’s a topical reference to some scene in a movie. The part I liked best was the snide adjective in the fifth panel: “adult” appears to be referring to the juvenile wizards in Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books, who all use dinky little wands instead of “manly” staves. On the other hand, the Wizard’s traditional implement has always been one of those wands, as we saw in the “I’m stumped” post just last month: