Tag / Wizard of Id

by zbicyclist

Fourth Wall

Mitch4 notes: “Or is it actually 4th-wall? I thought so because the art seems to show him looking out at us, but both parents are grimacing as though they heard this and are considering their responses.”

“Looks can be deceiving” seems like a phrase too old for Dennis’s purported age, so I’m going with 4th-wall.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – March 8, 2026

billr sends this in: “Is ARLO still a category?”

Excellent question for discussion! Societal norms have changed a bit; I note the increased presence of gratuitous @#$% and $%^& ) in casual speech (with the words, not the @##$ euphemism, in a way that would have had the nuns kick me out of school until I brought my parents and begged for reinstatement. Similarly, as comic strips have depended less on newspapers and more on other outlets, implied or implicit Arlo material seems to have become much more common.

Sometime back, we awarded 9 Chickweed Lane a permanent ARLO award, which it richly deserves. But then, is Brooke McEldowney really sneaking over anything on anybody? Or has his syndicate just decided it’s a popular strip that’s making us money, so let’s let him do soft porn?

So, the ARLO category hasn’t been abolished, but I (editor zbicyclist) haven’t been tagging things as ARLO much.

In this case, Pam and Fred could have been inebriated co-workers discussing other co-workers in disparaging terms — and including the big bosses in their disparagement. But probably not.

Here’s another example from Sally Forth, a strip with began in the simpler (for comics) times of 1982.

I’d be interested on what others think.

by phsiii

It’s…magic??

From Irv:

He comments,

The second and third frames in the second row are what IDU. If the Wizard is cheating, shouldn’t the beam and hangers be visible there as well as in the last frame? Otherwise, maybe he is cheating and conjures the beam and hangers to “prove” he wasn’t using magic in the previous frames even though he was? All told, IDU what’s going on here.

For that matter, if there’s some magic making the beam and hangers invisible that he somehow forgets? turns off? for the last frame, how did he appear to lift it off the ground??

by Kilby

Draconian Taxonomics

Tim Harrod submitted this Wizard of Id as a CIDU promptly on the day that it was published, exactly eight months ago today. As Tim put it: “Just a straight-up, no-analysis-possible I Do Not Get It“:

…
I can’t give a definite answer to Rodney’s question, either, but it probably depends on which cultural tradition the Dragon came from.

P.S. One reason that I did not like the Disney movie “Raya and the Last Dragon” is that the dragons were furry (rather than scaly).

by Kilby

Working (it all) out

Irv submitted this Wizard of Id Sunday strip as a CIDU, commenting: “The second and third frames in the second row are what IDU. If the Wizard is cheating, shouldn’t the beam and hangers be visible there as well as in the last frame? Otherwise, maybe he is cheating and conjures the beam and hangers to ‘prove’ he wasn’t using magic in the previous frames even though he was? All told, IDU what’s going on here.“

…
I agree with Irv: if there is no magic here, then the logistics of the Wizard’s cheating scheme simply do not work, for multiple reasons. The same problem in the second and third panels of the second row also applies to the first, and the hooks would also be visible in the third panel of the bottom row, since the barbell is drawn a little too low. Finally, the Wizard’s arms in the first panel of the bottom row appear to be impossibly long.