Uncle $crooge sends this in: “It’s probably some kind of weird McEldowney fetish so I probably will regret sending this in and learning something that I really don’t want to know. Still, maybe it’s just a harmless joke; I just have no idea what this strip is about.”
I don’t really understand it, either, but I’m giving it an Arlo tag just because it’s McEldowney. The ones before and after this one are also themed The Thorax Clinic, but have a different patient.
From Unca $crooge:
Usually I can understand the 9CL strip. It’s pretty formalistic, with a gag built around a super-hot, oversexed bimbo who is somehow coupled with a worshiping wimp who collapses into a catatonic state whenever in close proximity to said sexy partner. There are a half-dozen of these couples and while Brooke usually focuses on Super-Bimbo (Edda) and her identical daughters (Lolly and Polly), he occasionally switches things up and brings in one of the second banana couples. This week Brooke has turned the strip over to animal doc Fleurrie and her assistant / husband Sven who for the past three days have been rolling around among the cow chips while poor cow patient, Victoria (who can’t seem to swallow her grass), is forced to watch. Today, though, the scene shifts to the local lake where Fleurrie takes a dip into the frigid New England waters. Sure, it is the standard setup to have one of the hot women in a bathing suit but is there a joke here?
All I can come up with is that Sven grabbed her feet and pulled her under, but that sure isn’t obvious.
Jack Applin sends this in: “A hyphen between “you” and “know”? As in “you-know”? What sense does that make? If she will criticize his punctuation, then she should also condemn the excessive and random number of dots in his ellipses, though she is no better with her five-dot ellipsis.”
So she’s able to read thought balloons clearly enough to discern hyphens?
In honor of what would have been CIDU Bill‘s 70th birthday, here are a pair of comics that he would never have understood:
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P.S. When I first discovered this strip, I thought that the “60” in the first frame might be a wonderful, serendipitous coincidence, but alas, my math was off by a decade.
Mark H. sends this in: “OK, I get that Lolly is sneaking a peek at Polly with her ancient boyfriend / lover, and that Polly catches her at it. But is the last frame Lolly raising her hand for a turn? What happened to her engagement to Alistair?
Or is she vicariously joining in on the action?
This whole May (March?) / December thing seems to be one of McEldowney’s fixations. Kind of like Woody Allen…”
Chris Hoover sends this in: “I perceive this to be two jokes about typing but with your hand in the wrong position on the keyboard. However, I am unable to decipher the one on the right. For that matter, I’m not particularly certain about the one on the left.”
A similar gag from Nancy, but this one’s not a CIDU.
Thanks to Mark H.:
These were separated by five days (12/26 and 1/1), but the intervening strips didn’t seem to help.
Mitch suggested “I think there is supposed to be a confusion-of-twins plot going on” but I’m still lost. And Mike mooted “I think newspaper editors have just decided to give 9CL a permanent pass”, which might well be true, but surely Brooke had something in mind!?
Mark H. submitted this 9CWL strip last year as a “Geezer Alert” (and partial CIDU), asking: “Does anyone younger than 60 know about Jimmy Hoffa?” (The CIDU and/or puzzle component is to figure out what she might have said to him underwater.)
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P.S. It is so refreshing to post a Chickweed Lane strip that is not (automatically) “Arlo” material.
This was going to be a CIDU, but it seems to be a colorist error. That’s not a basketball, but a curled up armadillo. But they don’t change color when they curl up, so far as I know.
From Wikipedia: “When threatened by a predator, Tolypeutes species frequently roll up into a ball. Other armadillo species cannot roll up because they have too many plates. When surprised, the North American nine-banded armadillo tends to jump straight in the air, which can lead to a fatal collision with the undercarriage or fenders of passing vehicles.”
Usual John sends this one in. This gets a bit of s “Eww”
The previous one in this series is pretty good, too.
I had originally set Mark H.’s suggestion to appear on Valentine’s Day, but then Kilby used this comic in his post earlier today. All of this exposure proves that the text below is still relevant, so I’m posting it as a bonus for today.
Bill Bickel set up the Arlo Award tag to indicate comics that seem to have snuck in sexual references past a newspaper comic censor. Of course, the state of the newspaper business is such that comic censors, or copy editors in general, seem to be in short supply. Web comics are, of course, inedible (I mean ineligible) for an Arlo Award.
The award is a nod to Jimmy Johnson’s Arlo & Janis comic, which still has innuendos with some subtlety. But a special Arlo Lifetime Achievement Award has to go to Brooke McEldowney’s 9 Chickweed Lane.
Here’s one sent in by Mark H., who notes “Given that they’ve never been intimate, it’s not clear how she knows how big his macadamias are – except that, being a few years older, she probably baby-sat him in younger days.”
The aging of the twins in this strip has been mysterious; is she older?
But, yes, McEldowney established 3 days earlier that they haven’t had, well, you know what.
So, with the tiny power invested in me as one of the editors of Comics I Don’t Understand, I hereby give 9 Chickweed Lane a Lifetime Arlo Achievement Award.
Any acceptance speech may be NSFW.
Mark H. submitted this 9CWL quite a while ago(+), commenting: “Looks like the visuals in the first two frames are out of sequence. What woman wraps a towel around her head before going into the shower?“
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I agree that it does look odd, but I think the “out/in/out” sequence is necessary to make the “dash” effect work in the final panel. It’s really just that towel (on her head) that seems out of place.
P.S. (+) This strip is from August, but may have been overlooked amidst all the “swimming“, “milkshake“, and “accelerated maturation” issues we have seen in recent weeks. After all, they are all basically the same topic (the same one that we did not see just this past Wednesday, in “Hägar the Enabler“).
However, as long as we are on that subject, Mark H. also submitted the 9CWL below as an Arlo, commenting: “Given that they’ve never been intimate, it’s not clear how she knows how big his macadamias are….”
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Perhaps she was just estimating their diameter from the effectiveness of his testosterone level on her…
Comics I Don't Understand 