Interesting than panel 2 is overlaid over the right side of panel 1, rather than being separate. (Well, maybe not THAT interesting.)
Mitch4 sends this in: “LOL plus some nice word play, but not the sort to make it an OY.
I don’t know if it’s a feature or bug that the reader needs to insert “and” various places in each line to get the limerick scansion.”
There are cultural references here I’m not getting. GoComics is no help, since I can’t get their comments to work.
Boise Ed sends this in: “Is there a joke here?”
If this was a storyline comic, I would think this was just a setup day for more hilarity in the days following. But that isn’t the way this strip works.
Today we honor the memory of comics that are gone, but not quite (yet) forgotten, and especially those that faded away (not with a bang, but with a whimper). Some of these may not be completely dead, but all of them are at best only shadows of their former selves. Happily, none of them has been turned into a zombie.
The image above the headline was taken from “The Comic That Has A Finale Every Day“, about which Maggie the Cartoonist once asked, “I just don’t get the concept here. Who would read this? Why would a strip run a finale every single day?” I agree, but the tiresome image was merely a placeholder, the purpose of it all was an experimental exercise in creative commentary. The author (or perhaps perpetrator) was Ruben Bolling, who reported on his Substack site (on Groundhog Day) that the feature had finally been laid to rest at the end of last year. In stark contrast to all of the other strips listed below, I was not sorry to see that one disappear.
The end of Cul de Sac was particularly tragic. Not only did Richard Thompson lose his battle with Parkinson’s (in 2012), he was physically unable to give his brilliant creation the grand exit that he had hoped for, and ultimately selected an appropriately poignant rerun for the final strip:
The recent demise of Real Life Adventures was submitted by Boise Ed, who commented: “Another one bites the dust. I wish Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich and happy retirement, but it’s sad to see another of the good comics go away. I like the way the did it, though.“
Aaron Johnson’s niche comic “What the Duck” ran for ten years (from 2006 to 2016), and was picked up for syndication in 2008 (using the euphemistic title “W.T. Duck“). The GoComics archive began in 2009, but recently ended (without any explanation) exactly fifteen years later (in January 2024). Note that the dates of the strips in the GC archive have absolutely no relationship to the original publishing run. This was the author’s final strip, which seems to apply to cartooning just as much as to photography:
…
P.S. This is only the second time that What the Duck has appeared at CIDU: Bill posted a WtD six years ago.
Ink Pen was retired by its author nearly a dozen years ago, and has been stuck in rerun purgatory at GoComics ever since then:
…
Phil Dunlap’s tentative plan to release new Ink Pen comics once a week never materialized.
Bill Hinds gave Cleats a fitting sendoff on Halloween Sunday (2010), including some really creative ironwork on the gate:
…
According to The Daily Cartoonist, Hinds “decided to bring his comic strip to a close, citing the need to focus on other projects that are more economically profitable.” Wikipedia reports that the strip was in 75 newspapers, which apparently was not enough to make a viable living on, but Hinds did have Tank McNamara as a fallback, which at one point was appearing in 350 newspapers. Cleats is still in reruns at GoComics, and may (or may not) still be appearing in print somewhere, but this is the first time that it has appeared at CIDU in more than 15 years (that was over a decade before Comicgeddon).
Lennie Peterson’s motivation to terminate The Big Picture was somewhat similar:
…
When the strip went into reruns at GoComics, Peterson took the unusual step of creating some Sunday format strips to introduce the relaunch, in which he also announced his intention to (occasionally) insert new material among the reruns. I have not yet figured out how often this actually happened.
Bug Martini went mysteriously AWOL after the appearance of the following strip (on 21-April-2023):
…
P.S. Chak reported that Adam Huber has resurrected his strip after an 18 month absence, and Chemgal later mentioned (very presciently) that Chak had “figured it out long before me, which shows how infrequently I’ve been checking on my ‘might-be-dead‘ strips“. This is encouraging news, but there wasn’t any official “announcement” (or anything else new) on Adam’s website, except for a vague promise in the fourth panel of the strip that unexpectedly appeared on Sept. 25th:
…
Only time will tell whether Bug Martini will really remain alive. The website “caption” still claims “Random nonsense three days a week“, but that has not been the case for years. I think the best we can hope for is one strip per week (teaser ads for pay-per-view Sunday strips do not count). The current tally is four new strips over five weeks.
Pab Sugenis “ended” his “New Adventures of Queen Victoria” on 14-Feb-2021 with a special group photo, but has revived the strip on intermittent occasions since then (sometimes crediting ChatGPT for the “writing”):
…
The problem is that there’s no way to know when (or if) any new NAQV strips will ever appear at GoComics (the author’s own website has been shut down).
I just happened to include a Boondocks strip in yesterday’s Halloween post, not realizing (back then) that the strip has been in reruns for over 18 years. Here is the final Sunday strip, dated 26-Mar-2006 (immediately preceeding Aaron McGruder’s “planned for six months” sabbatical, which only later turned out to be involuntarily permanent):
Berke Breathed resurrected “Bloom County 2015” to indulge in some political humor. He periodically incremented the year in the title, but it never got past 2019 (the GoComics title card still says “2015”); nothing new has appeared there since 8-June-2020 (back when CIDU Bill was still with us):
…
Although his GoComics feed has dried up, Breathed does post some material on his Facebook page, but virtually all of it is re-runs. It’s simply not worth connecting to Zuckerberg’s sewer just on the off chance of finding a new Bloom County strip. The last new one appeared in August 2023:
The Perry Bible Fellowship still posts new comics on an irregular basis. Here again, the problem is knowing whether it is worth checking back for new material. Please note that PBF is very often NSFW.
Liberty Meadows was in print for less than five years (from March 1997 to December 2001). Frank Cho abandoned syndication in favor of self publishing to avoid repeated censorship problems:
…
The Liberty Meadows rerun archive at GoComics appears to start (Jan. 2002) in the middle of the original syndicated run. Cho continued to release book collections until 2006, but after a subsequent deal with Sony Pictures fell through, he finally announced (in 2012) that he had quit working on the strip: “As much as I want to do Liberty Meadows (believe me I want to), the other jobs pay better.“
The latest demise hasn’t even been completed (yet). The Daily Cartoonist just recently reported that Fort Knox (by Paul Jon) published its last daily strip on October 19th, although the last new Sunday strip won’t appear until November 10th.
…
P.S. Fort Knox is no longer available at GoComics (although it’s not clear whether that was a recent deletion). The strip is still available at Arcamax, at least for now.
P.S. Please feel free to mention (and link to) other dearly departed comics in the comments!
Boise Ed submitted this Cornered panel, commenting: “What a great put-down!“
…
P.S. A German flasher would hope she says: “That’s gross!“
P.P.S. To which he would then reply: “Dankeschön!“
F.Y.I.: Is everyone is already prepared for the upcoming holiday(s)?
How to tell a fruit from a vegetable:
…
Your attitude towards caramelizing may depend on whether you’re the one who does the dishes. Similarly with dishes such as tahdig, “a beautiful, pan-fried Persian rice that is fluffy and buttery on the inside with a perfectly golden crust, which is the layer at the bottom of the pot.” — if you make it right. The first few times might not produce “a perfectly golden crust”.
And we couldn’t leave without a couple of nods to autumn.
The character in the leaf pile is Wallace’s mom:
This one’s from 1962, when leaf burning was still a tradition:
Nothing like a little expert post-game analysis to ease the pain of a sporting event hangover.
Sometimes the intent and joke are clear, but you have the feeling there is a tiny bit of disappointment over a detail that is wrong, or at any rate could be improved.
Don’t you want the first panel to say “take requests” instead of “play requests”?
All right, a good point to be making. But it takes too much work to confirm that the two structureless and unparseable series of terms differ only in the first position, where one has senior and the other junior. Why can’t the series be more varied? Say, throw in a deputy or associate or adjunct. Go ask the second second assistant director (actual title on some film crews).
This Wrong Hands doesn’t quite work for me (==mitch). But maybe that’s because I don’t have the same vowel in fraud and frog. Is it better for someone who does?
My complaint here is trivial but it doesn’t stop bothering me, and distracting from the joke. The Joker is ALWAYS wild. Many times he is not included in the game, sure, but that doesn’t make him non-wild.
I wanted to pair this with a Bizarro I saw making almost the same joke, and with almost the same problem. It had both a Joker and a 2, and seemed to again attribute the part-time wildness to the Joker; when there was the opportunity to instead use our knowledge that “Deuces wild” is one of those dealer’s-choice options that would serve to make the 2 sometimes wild and sometimes not! The trouble is, that Bizarro was the June 2023 page on an official Bizarro hanging calendar on my wall, hence not so easily downloadable.
Well y’know what? That’s not an insuperable problem …
And, seeing it again, I should retract the claim that this one gets it wrong too. Here the Joker sometimes doesn’t feel like being wild, but is condemned to wildness always; and he is envious of the therapist deuce, for whom wildness is a sometime thing.
One difference is in the balance or proportions between the “Hey, it’s a holiday! Stores should have sales! Let’s go have a picnic!” aspect, and the comparatively somber commemorative and remembrance aspect — the “memorial” part.
From maggiethecartoonist we have this Real Life Adventures, which takes a focus on the holiday picnic (or rather, barbecue) aspect.
On the Remembrance side of things, another regular reader suggests this one:
… and provides a reminder that it has previously been the subject of a CIDU post and discussion.
Joe Heller seems drawn to combining the two aspects in one editorial-type cartoon:
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!
Thanks to Bill R, who says “It’s like they’re daring us to figure it out”. Which is why there is a CIDU category (“tag”) on this, along with the “(Not a CIDU)” for the OYs list in general. Look, don’t question it too hard. Oh, and it’s not a pun really, but gets an OY as a language-related item. Also this list was sitting bare too long …
The usage they’re disputing over was taught in my schooldays as one of “those common mistakes to be avoided”.
OK, I think (but am not positive) that I get the alternate meaning the joke depends on — from too many crime shows, the best deals a defendant’s lawyer might hope to extract from a prosecutor would involve setting no additional jail time, so the defendant gets to “walk away” or “take a walk”.
First I thought the outside guy was wearing an odd bathrobe; but throw in his laurel wreath and I guess he is at a toga party. But not the inside guy. Oh well, it doesn’t seem to affect the joke.
Possible cross-comic banter, based on spelling of the name?
Comics I Don't Understand 