… but nobody does anything about it

Reader Mike Pollock offers a “juxtaposition via T.A.R.D.I.S.” Perusing this Saturday Evening Post comics selection page, Mike thought the way the weather forecast lingo was handled in the two Stan Hunt panels here (from 1950 and 1955) was reflected in the very recent Zits below them.

“Small-craft warnings are being displayed from Cape Hatteras to Sandy Hook.”
Stan Hunt
September 30, 1950

“Try to think of it, dear, as simply a low-pressure system extending from The Great Lakes region into Ohio and eastward to the Atlantic States trapped between two areas to high pressure that…”
Stan Hunt
September 3, 1955

And with our editorial eyes opened to this idea, we were quick to note this Life on Earth:

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 17th, 2023

A Sad-LOL for sure!



Or is this maybe a Semi-CIDU for anybody?



McDonald’s decides to open one test site for a new concept, CosMc’s, to overmuch social media hype, and now a tip of the hat from Greg Cravens. In the current iteration, it’s drive-thru only, with no restrooms.



The “5-31” in the panel is easy enough, but I’m having a hard time making out the year in the (c) strip. Scrolling in the Comics Kingdom archive to the previous few strips, I think it could be 1967. 

Which is maybe late enough that she might have turned out to be the surgeon rather than the nurse. (Certainly by that year the joke/riddle of “A father and his son were out for a Sunday drive” was already quite popular.) Or no, how could a surgeon go out with an enlisted man?

[Does anybody need the rest of the story??]

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, 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




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.


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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!


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?

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, November 13th, 2022


Okay, maybe something of a CIDU-LOL. Google Translate is not as helpful as one would like — I don’t trust “cable castanets” . I do rather trust “box castanets” but why “light box castanets”? That’s not a “light box” as used in graphics arts, anyway. And I think the primary joke is our stand-in character enjoying “vulgar castanets” instead of “common-or-garden castanets”.



Is her expression already reacting to this irritating oversight?

But maybe this one was meant to make up for that?