Tag / John Hambrock

by zbicyclist

Merry Christmas

Just as in TV shows and movies, we don’t see people on the toilet, there must be part of the Santa experience they don’t show.

Santa – the true story

Yes, Fuzzy Math Gurus, there is a Santa Claus.

There are “facts” floating around the internet, “proving” that one Santa just couldn’t do it all, but they fail too see the obvious conclusion — FRANCHISING!  This also explains why “Santa” is often known as “Santa Claus”. 


Let me explain:

1.  Yes, it’s true Santa would need to make 822.6 visits per second, or 2,961,360 per hour.  However, if we assume that there are 740,340 worldwide Santas (the exact number is known only to the Salvation Army), then each Santa has to make 1 visit only every 15 minutes.

2.  Roughly speaking, this is

5 minutes for travel (footnote below)
1 minute for sorting out that house’s gifts
1 minute for chimney diving / lock picking
3 minutes for gift arranging
2 minutes for cookie eating
1 minute for exiting premises and returning to sleigh
2 minutes “slack” time for unforseen events (most commonly, large dogs)
—
15 minutes

3.  “Santa” is, of course, a very sought after title, and the geographic franchises to be the local “Santa” are subject to yearly adjustments due to population shifts.  The changes in the legal paragraphs governing geographic territories in the “Santa” agreement are called “Santa Clauses”, a term which eventually has been commonly applied to “Santas” themselves.

Thanks for the opportunity to clear this up.

Footnote: The travel time has been reduced considerably in this century by the use of “jet sleighs” manufactured by Boeing.  The original model 7 sleigh, in fact, is what gave the Boeing corporation its name.  Elves, noticing how the new sleighs (with, sadly, aluminum reindeer) bounced from housetop to housetop, cheered “Boing! Boing!”, which in an Elvin accent sounded like “Boeing! Boeing!”. 

[Mike Kruger, December 2003]

by zbicyclist

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – June 8, 2025

JMcAndrew sends this in: “Wouldn’t he be able to see a picture of the person he’s been matched with and probably other identifying information like their age? Also with the prevalence of actual child predators on the internet I’m surprised that the syndicate was okay with this storyline. I know he’s an idiot but this is like when Cartman on South Park tries to meet older men and joins NAMBLA.”

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies, LOLs – March 30, 2025

A few oldies to start us off.

JMcAndrew sends in this pair, which get a Geezer Alert. “Shouldn’t she check to see what the contents of the disk are before she gets upset? I like that she’s holding it by the corner because she assumes it’s filthy and Arlo’s very reasonable confusion here. The antiquated technology only makes it funnier 30 years later.”
If only she could. Gene’s not really wrong about compatibility, though. Our first PC was a Kaypro CPM machine, and its floppies weren’t readable by any other machine.

Boise Ed sends this one in: “Hah! I’d love to see this one in the real world.”

JMcAndrew sends this one in: “Confused about what the creators of this comic think “casual dress” is supposed to be. Is Lieutenant Flap wearing a dashiki? Do they think that Black people wear dashiki as “casual dress”? General Halftrack appears to be wearing a collared shirt and bow tie which is certainly not “casual dress”. I don’t know what is going on with Lieutenant Fuzz. Sarge might be wearing boxer shorts. His shirt just says “Go Sox” but doesn’t say which specific sports team with “Sox” in its name. I’m honestly more disturbed by his grotesque deformed feet than any of these outfits. Also why does Sarge have a different number of toes than Lieutenant Flap?”

Your editor admires the use of “Go Sox” while Sarge is wearing neither red socks nor white socks. No need to offend readers in Boston or Chicago.

JMcAndrew sends this in: “I’m almost afraid to ask what Ditto was doing that resulted in most of the film roll not being viable.”

This definitely gets a Geezer tag. These days, letting a child borrow your phone for a while to take pictures of whatever, and then review them is as common as cell phones.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 22st, 2024

Jack Applin submitted this “Edison Lee” last year as a CIDU, but Comics Kingdom refused to produce it, until I remembered to change the URL from the old “.net” to the new “.com” address. Ooops.

…
Jack commented: “Sure, the Rankin/Bass special. But what’s this about a finger in a nose? It wouldn’t BE in the special, if he were edited out.”

The humor is mostly just slapstick, but “nose” is probably a reference to the line in “The Night Before Christmas” (and the elf just messed up while “…laying his finger aside of his nose“).

Speechless Santa. Fill in your own dialogue. (GoComics posting error on 12/15. It’s clearly a GoComics error, because Arcamax shows the dialogue. GoComics corrected the error a day later.) It’s oddly meta, because panel 3 in the actual dialogue accuses Santa of not keeping up with the latest technology.

Steve B. sends this in. “Thought this was clever. Not sure everyone will get this if they don’t pay attention to the news.”

Mark H. send this in, noting “It took me a while”.

by Kilby

Pirate Equity from Vulture Capitalists

Boise Ed called our attention to an entire story arc from “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee“, commenting: “This takes the Fourth Wall idea to a new level. Starting with Monday, June 24, John Hambrock had a private equity firm take over the strip, first replacing the furniture and then the characters themselves, to scrape expenses. The daily jokes were (intentionally) pathetic…. Basically, it was a two-week screed against the evils of soulless private equity firms….”

It seems a bitter coincidence that Lee Enterprises has been gutting the comic pages (and publication frequency) for a very large number of newspapers. However, this arc appeared before Lee Enterprises announced a mandatory wholesale switch to King Features (the syndicate that publishes Edison Lee).

Here is a selection of strips, including links to the first and last strip of the arc. Because of the way the Comics Kingdom website works, the best way to read the entire story is to open the last strip, then load additional strips until you get back to the first strip, and then read upwards in the window from the first strip to the last.

P.S. Don’t forget to close that annoying popup frame with the lame Popeye cartoon!

This is the way the arc began:

This was the final strip of the arc:

…
At the end, Boise Ed also asked: “I wonder if [we] will see the old characters comment on that, or if the strip will just resume its version of normalcy.”

P.P.S. The arc was in fact self-contained, without any internal reflection after it was over.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, September 08th, 2024

Okay, so exposing and satirizing clickbait and spam is not entirely an original idea. But what excellent execution there is in the deflating domain names!

Possibly inspired by the number of people who refer to a pickleball racquet, rather than paddle. Oar maybe not.

Typically when we’ve dealt with a long-form Cat and Girl, the cartoon has seemed to need some explaining, and we shoehorn it into a CIDU option of some kind. So what a pleasure it is to see them straightforwardly taking on some “complaint observational humor” (well, with exaggeration, but that’s to be expected).

by multipleciduers

Labor-day-published gallery

These are just whatever was at least pretty good, was dated today, and was in some way about the Labor Day holiday or tradition. … A quick survey of which cartoons were willing to be about the holiday and which preferred to go on their own way.

by EditorM

Obligatory topic

Okay, it’s Resolutions…

Luann


“This year we’ll turn it around” counts as a resolution in my book!

Crabgrass
Adam@Home Comic
Half Full
Mike Du Jour
Wallace the Brave

Maybe IDU that one?

Nancy: still looking for loopholes after all these years (and cartoonists!)