Recent or Old?

The New Yorker has a feature called Laugh Lines. The challenge there is to place several cartoons in chronological order. We’re going to play a version of this with pairs of cartoons that appear in the CIDU archives. Each pair will be from the same comic, so style will be a clue. The link with the letter points to the original posting here at CIDU. The years aren’t that far apart, because they only go back to when Bill had to restart the site. I’ve added a couple at the end that aren’t from the CIDU archives and are farther apart.

Pair #1. A:

B:


Pair #2. A:

B:


Pair #3. A:

B:


#4, a triplet (not from CIDU archives)

A:

B:

C:

#5 (not from CIDU archives)

A:

B:

Do you Mean What you Say?

Thanks to Usual John for sending this in, and for useful email discussion! His focus is on the bottom strip, where we get amusing literalized visions of some common idiomatic expressions. Except — we apparently no longer have an idiom to match “He had a pony on his cuff”. So, what would that mean, apart from what’s in the literal illustration?

By the way, can anyone assist my memory and give me a clue why I remembered this Origins of the Sunday Comics feature as not always in the past being a genuine historical exploration, but rather including sometimes a parodic or fictive-history take? Maybe mental contamination from reading a sometime series of posts in Working Daze, pretending to trace a century-long history of that strip, thru different writers and artists, and even titles and publishers.