CSotD: Friday Funnies, plus a Flashback
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Timing Is Everything Dept. — Man, I wish I’d had today’s Non Sequitur (AMS) yesterday when I was defending Dylan’s decision to sell his catalog rather than administer it himself. Wiley penned this well before the announcement, but he does sum it up nicely.
Arlo, in Arlo & Janis (AMS), frequently reflects on age, and this is a good example. I have friends who are hooked on celestial phenomena, but I’ve slipped into the “seen it” demographic with most stuff.
A couple of buddies and I dragged lawn chairs out onto the middle of the lake and built a fire to watch a total lunar eclipse back in about 1964, and I did a total solar eclipse with my kids some 40 years ago. And 25 years ago, my then-GF and I used to see Hale-Bopp when we walked the dogs at night.
I’d still venture out for a good set of Northern Lights, though it would be hard to top the night back in 1968 when a mix of high school pals and Ranger School students went up to the dump where there were no lights to mess up what was a spectacular show of pink curtains. And would have been, even if we hadn’t been stoned.
Ah, youth.
But I’m with Janis on this one.
Though looking at today’s Betty (AMS), it appears Bub hasn’t lost his penchant for youthful curiosity. This is a great wait-a-minute punchline.
I’m sure it’s because he’s been shopping for her Christmas present and wants it to be a surprise.
No doubt in my mind. Where’s yours?
I’ve also reached an age where, like Olivia in Ben (MWAM), I’ve become one of Those People. I’d say I “wrapped it up” the weekend after Thanksgiving, but I haven’t wrapped anything yet and am waiting for one retailer to send the last of the stuff.
After which I’ll procrastinate until the last minute, because I don’t think there will ever be an age at which I embrace wrapping presents.
Or become good at it. My wrapping technique hardened at about age six.
Also on the holiday theme, Maria Scrivan offers a deeply disturbing mystery at Half Full (Trib). I’m torn between guessing and not wanting to know, and I salute her for not having included the answer and spoiling the fun.
I can eliminate a couple because they’re also jelly bean flavors, but then I get down to the point where every flavor I pick as the phony leaves something truly appalling among the real ones.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Two takes on the fun game of reading folk tales literally, and a brief pause to observe that neither of these are “fairy tales” because fairies pop up mostly in French stories, while German folklore seems more based on witches and nasty mortals.
PMP’s take on Snow White uses the Disney costuming but adds a level of kink that I don’t think Walt would approve, which makes it that much funnier, because kissing a dead girl was pretty kinky to begin with, so how Charming is this guy anyway?
Rapunzel getting yanked out the window made me laugh, but it also sent me back to the source, because I had a feeling this was covered in the original, and, indeed, she secured her hair on a window hook to avoid such a misadventure.
But in reading that original, you find it sure is hard to be grimmer than the Grimms.
Note that these tales were not specifically intended for children, but perhaps they’re why the children grew up to be adults who liked really morbid stories.
Here’s the antidote: A decidedly ungrim Bizarro (KFS) that simply made me smile, though I do suspect that artisanal ice cream includes some of those flavors in Maria Scrivan’s comic.
In any case, Wayno has captured the artisans perfectly.
And now for something completely different:
A 95-year-old public service effort
With a h/t to Rob Stolzer, here’s a fascinating discovery from 1925, when Dayton had a $400,000 bond issue on the ballot to build a “children’s home” or orphanage, and Edwina Dumm created a special Cap Stubbs strip to help promote the effort.
I had heard of, but hadn’t encountered, the strip, and I not only like her art but particularly like the little sideshow of Cap’s dog biting the obnoxious kid. And the fact that she pitched in for a good cause.
As did Harold Gray, whose young orphan had a particularly passionate feeling about such things, as well she might.
Those two appeared in the Dayton Herald, but the Dayton News got in on the act and recruited their own cartoon foundling to make an appeal.
I have a particular fondness for this youngster, who was found on Walt’s doorstep on Valentine’s Day, 1921, about six weeks before my father was born and thereby acquired the nickname Skeezix as a youngster.
The bond issue passed overwhelmingly, by the way, and the new facility opened in June, 1928.
I was surprised by this Oct 30 strip because I’d never heard of “Cabbage Night” until I moved to Northeastern New York in 1987, where it was firmly established as the night before Halloween, which is called “Devil Night” elsewhere but which in those places doesn’t leave shattered cabbages all over the streets.
Meanwhile, those papers were fun to poke around in, because comics had grown from a decade or so before when they were scattered throughout the paper and, by now, had complete pages, plus a few other strips elsewhere.
Comics were enough of a thing that the Herald employed them to remind people to have the paper mailed to their vacation address. For comic historians, that’s a pretty All-Star lineup, though none of them are specific to the Herald and may have been generic pieces sent to all subscribing papers.
The Good Old Days. Not every newspaper today even gives you a rebate for missed issues when you go on vacation.
(Pretty sure the Herald’s phone number — Garfield 3000 — is a coincidence.)
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