We discussed this first Macanudo strip (in both languages) in the “Macanudo Road” post in April:
At the time I thought that Liniers changed the name of the leader because Ringo is still alive (and John isn’t), but a pair of subsequent strips give me the impression that he just likes bashing on drummers:
(Of course, this strip has absolutely nothing to do with the way nor why Best was actually dumped from the Beatles.)
Just like the first strip above, the question here is “Why Ringo?” (Perhaps he is supposed to be the one with the lowest level of awareness-enhancing substances in his system?)
“It was nice while it lasted.” Okay, I’ll buy the pairing. Both are sweetly regretful but have just a tiny bit of a sting, don’t you think?
But now, today’s Baldo, also twice:
Now at first this looks like something we’ve seen a few times with Baldo: A pun or language-dependent joke in the English version, and then a reduction to a univocal expression in the Spanish version with no attempt to preserve the polysemy needed for the pun.
But not this time!
The key is in hachacento, which does not register as a recognized or translatable Spanish word, at least by Google Translate. But looking at parts:
hatchet ==> hacha accent ==> acento
So we do get both axe and accent! (But not sent ==> enviad{o/a}. But who cares at this point!)
P.S. Don’t forget to stop and smell the noises in panel 3.
From the “Wisdom from the Funny Papers” Department. Sometimes a “cry for help” must be responded to with help. Sometimes when “they’re just doing that for attention” the humane response includes paying attention.
BTW, Maritsa Patrinos of the Six Chix now has her own separate strip, called Working Cats and appearing at Comics Kingdom.
I thought this was going to be about sentence-adverbs; but it was better than that. (Hopefully, everybody remembers what the controversies and pseudo-rules about sentence-adverbs were.)
No, I don’t see a joke here. But also I can’t say there’s supposed to be one, so it’s not really a CIDU. So let’s just take a minute to admire the artistry here. Such draughtsmanship! That ice-cliff shows us both distance and height, even while a whole surface is devoid of detail.
Scammers certainly are getting more creative. I got a “reimbursement” from my Jane Doe, the condo property manager, with the email Jane.Doe@propfirm.com, which was suspiciously close to her actual email of Jane.Doe@propfirm.net, and this is a person I occasionally get reimbursements from (luckily as old-school physical checks)
From Dan Piraro’s subscription newsletter, “The Naked Cartoonist“. I’ll conclude with an early collaboration with Wayno; a Bizarro cartoon about red flags in relationships. If only they were this obvious in real life!
I thought the difficulty regarding the USB Type-A plugs was traditionally the alignment when making the connection. And that disconnecting is, if anything, a bit too easy — as the post title notes, it doesn’t take much.
Side questions: Is the Spanish text somewhat antique, as the English is? And, in the middle panel do we see more of the sword that doesn’t quite match the reveal of the last panel?
CIDU QUEUE REMINDER
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This is a (very) long post, and I hope that it will generate an equally large amount of discussion. Everyone here is of course free to express their own opinions, and while I do not expect that everyone will agree with everything that I have written, I hope that you all will continue to observe the customary standards of decorum that have become a hallmark of CIDU.
Over the past few months the Daily Cartoonist has reported extensively about the way that Gannett has “restructured” the comics for all of their newspapers. A more recent TDC report theorized that one motivation for Gannett’s microscopic menu was misogynistic chauvinism, and Georgia Dunn adapted this hypothesis into Breaking Cat News:
It is undeniably true that newspaper comics have been a male-dominated business for over a century, but I think it both misses the point (and weakens the argument) to ascribe Gannett’s motivation exclusively to chauvinism. Gannett has simply selected old, reliable, and non-controversial mainstays. The average age of the strips on their “approved” list is approximately half a century, and back then virtually every single comic author was male. Gannett is not discriminating directly against “women”, the company is discriminating against all new authors, no matter whether they are women, men, or transgender.
As I already commented at TDC, “Gannett has selected a tired collection of dull, ancient (mostly zombie) strips, and has presumably negotiated a massive volume discount from the syndicate, because they are in a position to impose this lame collection onto dozens of defenseless editorial offices, in complete disregard of what readers would actually prefer. This is just window dressing for the sake of being able to claim that the Gannett papers still offer a comic section; the corporate leadership doesn’t care one iota whether anyone would bother to keep a subscription to read any of those features, and Gannett would probably prefer if all of their papers dropped the comics entirely.“
In addition, I also do not think that it is fair to assume that only a woman can create a convincing female character. Although female authors have always been in short supply, there are nevertheless a number of strong, positive girls in the comics, each of which goes a long way to dismantle the antiquated stereotypes set by “Blondie“, “Momma“, and “Nancy“, or (even worse) in “Andy Capp” and “The Lockhorns“.
Here’s a selection of some of my favorites. Most are written by men, but there is one woman and one trans author in this collection:
First and foremost, there are both Amelia and Rose in Will Henry’s “Wallace the Brave“:
Then we have Henrietta (Enriqueta) in “Macanudo” (by Liniers, not to mention whoever does those brilliant English translations; his only translator’s name that I was able to discover was – not surprisingly – a woman: Mara Faye Lethem):
Cynthia in “Barney & Clyde“:
Danae (and her sister) in Wiley’s “Non-Sequitur“:
The last BCN panel shown above refers to “Phoebe (and her Unicorn)”. Personally, I preferred Dana Simpson’s original title (“Heavenly Nostrils“), but I guess it just wasn’t marketable:
Making an exception for a re-run, there’s Alice in Richard Thompson’s “Cul de Sac“:
Making another exception for a zombie, especially because it was inherited by a woman, there’s “Heart (of the City)“:
P.S. The bottom line is that the only thing that publishing companies care about are their own bottom lines. If we are ever going to get an inclusive (multi-gendered) set of new authors in newspaper comics, it will be necessary for the readership to change their fossilized habits and to start petitioning for papers to drop all the reruns that are currently cluttering (even choking) those comic sections. That doesn’t just mean “Cul de Sac“, it also means letting “Peanuts“, “Calvin & Hobbes“, and a number of other popular “zombie” strips go. I regret to say that for obvious reasons, I don’t think this is going to happen any time in the near future.
Just continuing to document days when the English and Spanish versions of Macanudo aren’t translations. Here the text differs, but the fun conceit is the same.
Comics I Don't Understand 