Today’s Comic Strip Oddities & Curiosities

So alphabetically Loose Parts follows Looks Good on Paper and yesterday they had an eruptive juxtaposition.

Joining in the Mutts 30th anniversary celebration is the only not-Patrick McDonnell cartoonist, that I know of, to draw a Mutts comic strip – Jim Keefe. At his Patreon account Keefe tells how it happened that he partnered with McDonnell to produce the March 23, 2003 Mutts Sunday page. He shows the original Flash Gordon figuration.

But here is how it appeared in newspapers with the Mutts title panel:

And the 1935 Big Little Book that inspired the title panel.

By the way, yesterday Breaking The Chain was #1 on Amazon’s Best Sellers in Comic Strips list. #2 today.

Junco Returns!

We last saw Junco Canché on La Cucaracha in December of 2023. Lalo Alcaraz was last seen here getting a new gig. So Junco has returned (more or less permanently?) to La Cucaracha this week – helping Lalo since the 2nd of September.

An Aside.

The National Football League season started last night on NBC. As part of their promotion for NFL Sunday Night Football on NBC they produced a poster featuring all of the NFL teams but as The Daily Globe reports:

Thursday officially marks the start of the NFL season and to celebrate that, NBC’s Sunday Night Football put together a cartoon.

While there is one person for each team in the league represented in the cartoon, there’s also one famous inclusion at the center of the photo – Taylor Swift.

Fans of the sport weren’t exactly pleased with the decision to put the pop star front and center, especially considering how inundated fans were with images of her last season at various Kansas City Chiefs games.

‘Why is she in there? This is getting ridiculous!,’ wrote one user on Twitter.

Me? I’m upset that I can’t find the identity of the cartoonist who drew the poster.

“I’d like to be…”

If you’re going to sing a Beatles song at the bottom of Sherman’s Lagoon, shouldn’t it be “Octopus’s Garden”?

Velia Returns!

Rina Piccolo, currently co-producing Rhymes With Orange, is intent on bring her Velia, Dear comic back to life.

Rina tells us on her newly launched SubStack page:

For the past couple of years I’ve been working on some stories. Do any of you remember “Velia, Dear,” a webcomic I ran more than a decade ago? Let me know in the comments if you recall it (all two of you)! In any case, the characters I’m introducing to you today were the stars of a comic I ran a long time ago on a notably different internet, when webcomics were fairly new (or at least new to an old fogy like me). Anyway, Velia and the rest of the cast of characters have been dead for more than a decade — and lately I’ve been pumping new life into their inky veins!

I’ll be pitching the “Velia Comics” collection to alternative comics publishers…

Read all about it at the Rina Piccolo Comics + More Substack. (hat tip: Sean Kleefeld)

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