I was able to identify the sources for most of the cartoon eyes without help, but I’m still completely stuck on the fifth panel. I’m not going to name the others, so as not to spoil the guessing game for everyone else.
P.S. Stay away from GoComics, their idiotic “featured comment” gimmick betrays the rest of the answers.
From Boise Ed:
He quite reasonably wonders, “What does Napoleon have to do with bisecting a soccer ball?”
Thanks to Boise Ed for suggesting this one, and providing the “fifth wall” classification! :-)
I’m really not sure what is going on in this comic. What good will the sign do?
This was a CIDU for me for a couple minutes. And I’m still not sure of the intended idea.
BTW, is a clock a standard part of Twister play?
Thanks to Maggie-the-Cartoonist for this Loose Parts LOL:
I don’t know whether this is supposed to be the joke / the point of the cartoon, but I think it’s definitely a brilliant choice to have the meeting for the road-ragers take place safely online!
We’ll serve a can o’ peas for the partygoers to munch on.
And will they serve a Moose Boosh?
comma, Did we come in?
I thought perhaps the local paper had messed this up but no, it’s the same online. Either there’s a first panel missing or the dialog is just borked.
Mitch suggests, “except that the Nancy artist likes playing meta games and so forth and could be intentionally starting off in medias res…”
What does the braintrust think?
Boise Ed sends the above, noting, “It’s not that IDU what’s happening, but why is it funny that the guy has stiffed the Girl Scout?”
I’d also add that there seems to be a video camera in the background, AND the woman in pink is driving something that looks more like a courtroom typewriter than a laptop–is this a recycled strip? Yet neither Tineye nor Google Images finds it, so maybe not. Perhaps Hoest and Reiner are stuck in the past?
It’s Halloween! It’s one of the set of similar days with very different tones: There’s the Day of the Dead, with reverence for the departed. There’s Halloween, where in theory the evil spirits have power, but has evolved into a chance to meet the neighbor kids, if only briefly. There’s All Saints Day on November 1, a day of celebration. Following that, on November 2, is All Souls Day, which I remember in particular for that scary sequence in the old Latin liturgy:
O wrath, O day of mourning,
O hear the fateful prophet’s warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning. …
When the Judge his seat attaineth,
And each hidden deed arraigneth,
Nothing unavenged remaineth.
What shall I, frail man, be pleading?
Who for me be interceding,
When the just are mercy needing? …
The general tone is aptly captured in Verdi’s or Mozart’s Dies Irae, from their Requiem Masses.
Of course, you might also mistranslate “Dies Irae” as “Day of the Iras”, and listen to Ira Glass’s This American Life, or some of those great songs from George and Ira Gershwin. Or not.
Comics I Don't Understand 