Last week — 4th wall needed for a watching-the-news story. (It’s just the date formatting that makes this look like a panel from the future.)
The joke is somewhat spoiled (or at least delayed) by the way the sightlines are drawn. But it emerges that what sound like rules for a tweenage girl being left home alone are being directed to Baby Bear (the dog); who isn’t agreeing to them. (And yes, still downloads from WaPo as .AVIF and needs pre-converting.)
And this Wondermark is not really much of a LOL, but it does provide a chuckle, and prompts me to remember encountering another sense of “Bridge club” in some novels of British India (probably Paul Scott) — it was a party with several ethnic groups invited, and intended to bridge the cultural gaps.
Now that Word Press has adjusted to occasional WEBP format images (and most of our browsers), we face a new challenge: AVIF files. Just in case it doesn’t show properly, I will follow it with a PNG conversion. But here’s hoping the AVIF will work in its given form and in future we needn’t bother producing conversions.
It’s the Final Four in college basketball, and the start of baseball season, so get ready for vicarious excitement!
But is there a Conservation of Vicarious Excitement?
Fact checking: Recent historical opinion tends to exculpate the bovine in question!
And as a gesture of public service, here is a corrected image for those who encountered it horizontal:
Okay, it has been explained to me. Hence, marked “CIDU-solved”.
But it’s already scheduled, and rather than scurry to replace it let’s give some eager cidu-beaver the opportunity to jump in and say “Well clearly, ….”
In the lane of “I guess I get the intended joke point, but the execution is unsuccessful” we have this “powdery math” example from zbicyclist. “I’m lost here. He’s eating one donut, and has another on his plate. That’s two donuts. So how is it 50% less sugar than two donuts?” I guess the *one* donut Leroy is waving around does have 50% less sugar than the two he has altogether, since it’s 50% less donut.
I thought at first it was going to be the funnish kind of percentage mistake coming from inconsistent base. We’re going to increase your supply of widgets by 10%. But now you have too many, so we’ll reduce your supply by 10%. That should put you back where you started …. eh?
Why even begin to use the Jeopardy setup? Then not use their layout? And if we grant that eating triple bacon cheeseburgers presents a risk to a heart, does that require that answering a question about them also does?
The main-punch of this charming joke is clear enough — curiosity may be fatal to cats (as in the common saying) but not to these patients. But what is it that the vet has diagnosed as a case of curiosity? And is it supposed to be clear why he speaks in the singular, and which one of the dogs is the patient?
I dunno, maybe the problem is that the top section looks like a “throwaway panel” but actually it’s essential that it appear right above the scene with the cars. Because it’s the upper-storey window and sign for the gym? But we still have to pin down the connection between weight-lifting and how that extra car got where it is.
If your thing is to visually or linguistically play off some familiar phrase or saying that almost everybody surely knows …. there’s going to be trouble when you use some that nobody knows. (All right, I know about “disruptor”. But that’s about it.)
Okay, let the anatomists explain from the configuration of fingers (and additional hand in panel 2) that the hand doing the artwork in panels 2 and 3 has to be Nancy’s. Even so, what does it get her? And if it could possibly be Fritzi’s own, does that mean her panel 1 nag about “the expression on my face” was just a fancy prank setup?
(This was actually part of a linked series, but seeing the preceding strips wouldn’t make much difference, apart from explaining what might otherwise be a mysterious detail — she was hit in the head by a flying baseball, and is holding an ice bag to it for pain relief.)
And a second shot for Pardon My Planet. This one is a LOL-CIDU. It did take a couple minutes before we got it – but not hard enough to justify making it a separate CIDU post. Also (I confess) it shows the perils of holding on to a negative attitude about some comic strip — one reason I didn’t get it at first was dismissing some meaningful details as merely haphazard artwork.
(And the tweet as an image capture in case the embedding doesn’t work.)
A reply invoking Nancy:
(Tech aside: I wanted to embed just @sipryor’s reply with the Nancy, but since he quote-replies @tramfrau’s tweet it seems to get repeated here, though we have it separately above and don’t need it again.)
The Nancy as an image, in case the Twitter embedding stops working:
As the Twitter thread goes on to observe, the comics have a long and rich history of playing with the borders and frames in interesting ways. But the Mister Invincible is especially clever about identifying a paradox akin to the time-travel puzzles, and then solving it.
UPDATE!
Tuesday 2021-Aug-10
CIDU regular elGeo has discovered, at the interesting Solrad site, a version of this Mister Invincible comic which is more complete — the one we got from Twitter and posted lacks the top and bottom wide panels. (Also corrected in the tags: the artist’s name is spelled Jousselin.) BTW, Solrad’s discussion of Jousselin’s frame-breaking is quite interesting.
Comics I Don't Understand 