Chess on earth

Sometimes Life on Earth will seize on some setting or prop or situation to use in several daily panels, without any clear intent to take them together as anything like a narrative sequence or theme-and-variations. All I can come up with about the examples below is that they all involve the game of chess, in one way or another.

(10/07)

Teresa Burritt, creator of the GoCreator designation & pin, has been practicing what she preached, and showed up in the GoComics comments for the “Strip Chess” one. She noted that the guy with the one red sock apparently had matching underpants. Hey wait a minute, just how nude is this guy?!

(10/08)

(10/09)

(10/10)

This would be my choice for “one of these is actually funny”.

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, October 1st, 2023



A nice LOL-Ewww:


And then a nice LOL-Awwww:


And who doesn’t enjoy a good Alexa-Siri joke?




And an Ouch-LOL:

He meant to order an inflatable doll, but received an inflatable bed of nails.

P.S. A couple days later, this character and that prop re-appear; but decidedly not funny :-( .

BTW, Gocomics gives this feature filenames that look like loesp230927.jpg, clueing us that at some point they were considering it to be Life On Earth in Spanish. (The same artist does the Life on Earth comic.)


Again on the meta train.


Sunday Funnies – LOLs, June 25th, 2023


Has Downton Abbey replaced Upstairs, Downstairs in the hearts and minds of Retro-Anglophiles? Well, not this canine one! …

However, I don’t remember it well enough to know the reasons for Snoopy’s delight at the idea of staying with Georgina. Was she the secretary that the widower eventually married? Or the sort of niece-in-law-once-removed?


“Didn’t we just have a different cartoon with an alligator at the dentists?”
“Maybe, but I thought that was a crocodile.”
Whatever! It was Monday’s CIDU:


Remember when they would say El Greco painted tall narrow figures because of his astigmatism?



Not gonna get that job with HMV Records!


Saturday Morning OYs – May 27th, 2023




[Farcus for 22-May-2023 removed by WordPress.]

If you’re thinking “Didn’t we just see this same joke?” you may be remembering this Life On Earth we posted recently. (Hey, that was in Sunday Funnies – LOLs, May 7th, 2023 . How come the Farcus today goes in the OYs?)


Found on Facebook without good information. We’ve tagged for “Frank Svoboda” based on the (c) line; but searching that name finds someone who was a collector / dealer / agent but doesn’t say he was also a creator, and those roles could fit with copyright holder. So maybe the writing on the side of the bar is the signature? It seems to say “Phranque” and while there is a band with that name I didn’t find any cartoonists or illustrators. And maybe that brings us back around to Frank S, who could have liked stylizing his first name.


A suggestion from Maggiethecartoonist:

Discussion among Maggie and the editors suggested that there are several informations perhaps not immediately known to all readers, which are useful to unpacking the multiple jokes/OYs here. So something of a semi-CIDU.


Sunday Funnies – LOLs, May 7th, 2023


And a counterpoise of business meeting strategy, and who gets to speak up, from 9-to-5:



Do any disguised superheroes actually do this?





Thanks to Usual John for this one!


M’aidez with some Not-Quites and Oopsies

Peculiar but not quite an intriguing CIDU, wry but not quite a LOL, pun-adjacent but not quite an OY, or just based in a factual mistake …

Here in a current two-day sequence for Reply All, is there room to agree “Neither one is actually funny at all”?

Thanks to Mike Pollock, who says “You don’t often see graphical captions with typographical errors. Is Curly Bracket [ } ] there intentionally?”

Okay, maybe this is just quibbling, but we all know a real Etch-A-Sketch doesn’t erase that way. You need to turn it face-down and shake. Or maybe it can marginally work to keep it face-up and shake vertically as well as side-to-side — but the shake lines here don’t suggest that enough.

Well, no. Frank does have multiple sources, multiple origins — so the Ancestry.com jokes work well. But there’s nothing about his special situation that puts him here, and here, and here too.

And the squirrel trying to justify it accomplishes nothing much. The map notations say “You are here” not “You have been here” – just as real building directories do.


This says “WANTED — [strikeout]ALIVE[/strikeout] OR DEAD”.

But, but … which party is supposed to be pictured on the poster, the hunter or hunted?


Sorry to pick on Whamond, but while we all know about cartoon physics I have some doubt about cartoon math. That’s the plain number three, he’s not in any respect irrational or in danger of turning irrational. He could slide up to pi nearby and be not only irrational but transcendental — but there is no indication of that happening. He’s just three, the natural number, not irrational and not even negative.

Dr. Lesis Moore

Maybe this should be held until the next time we assemble an Oopsies list post. But even if the wording owes something to bad translation or the author not being a native speaker of English, it’s still hard to guess how anything even somewhat plausibly translatable this way could fuel a story or joke to go with the drawing. Hey, is that even un patito at all?