As always — but it needs saying explicitly again now and then — we like to think of this as a reader-participation site, and not just for your invaluable (or anyhow amusing) comments, but for suggestions of comics to run and discuss.
Please share your specific suggestions of panels or strips, in CIDU, LOL, and OY categories, either by direct email to
From Ooten Aboot, with an illuminating commentary:
In 1874, a similar culture clash happened in real life when Montreal’s McGill University challenged Harvard to a two game “football” match. To McGill, “football” meant Rugby, while Harvard followed “Boston Rules”, a version of Soccer with limited catching and carrying of a spherical ball. The solution was to play one game under each set of rules. Harvard won the “Boston” game, while the Rugby result was a 0-0 tie. Nevertheless, Harvard apparently liked the McGill style and adopted similar rules, so that encounter with McGill may have been the origin of American Football as it known today.
I think this counts as a pun, even without doing a pun-joke.
The above sent by Andréa, who particularly notes Tom Waits getting mentioned, saying “Never thought I’d see HIM in a comic – made my day!”. And one of your editors had the pleasure of taking a couple classes from Professor Lance Rips, who liked to point out that his name constitutes a complete sentence.
Meant to post this earlier.
I learned the word prodigal in the context of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and thought it meant something like all the characteristics of the guy in the story – wandering, absent, returning after a long absence and acting all entitled, etc, all packaged in that one word. Only much later did I start seeing contexts that wouldn’t support all of that meaning, and learned the base sense spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant.
And then discovered that was what it meant in the Parable, too. But there had not been enough help from the context to make that choice clear! And this fits the philosopher’s point that, if your informant points to a rabbit and says gavagai, maybe they are telling you the word means rabbit — but maybe it means finger.
Is there any truth to the “Hint”? And if it were so, would that give the first sentence a logical reading, in some meaning other than the straightforward one (as used in the film), of the bridegroom dying (being killed) following the marriage ceremony?
In this age of “Use your inside voice” it’s good to know where the range of voice options reaches.
A bit of a LOL-Eww:
When we first saw this, it was in the black-and-white version sent in the Bliss daily email, and our first thought was to look forward to the color version and see how the notorious Twitter “bluecheck” verified-user symbol would be rendered. Not blue, in the event.
And a bit of LOL-Cynical:
In case you didn’t know, the “Nick and Zuzu” comic panels run as accompaniment to an advice column by Carolyn Hax. Sometimes they really depend on the writing and are totally CIDU without it. Other times, the comic is quite independent of the column which sparked it; and that is the case here. And the cartoons appear elsewhere, where the column is not available or even mentioned, such as GoComics.
But in case you are interested: the Hax column which had this as its illustration was at this link, which has a paywall but should allow some free visits.