Today’s first complaint is simple: Either this is a multi-panel caption contest or GoComics didn’t print the black plate in Barney & Clyde (Counterpoint). But I scrounged around and found a different version. When I was doing education work, I ran Short Cuts, a weekly full-page educational cartoon that was sent in two parts for […]
Andertoons (AMS) takes a daring step, making a joke based on the reader having a good vocabulary, but which is funnier if the reader has just enough of a good vocabulary to know what the word means and to feel somewhat proud of that. That is, if ubiquitous/ubiquity were more common words, there’d be nothing […]
Tommy Siegel offers an explanation of what happened this week, and, while foolish arrogance doesn’t explain it all, I feel free to skip politics today and just offer some laughs and general social reflection. I think the political cartoonists need some time to reflect and refocus. There have been some good responses, as seen here […]
Creative spelling, as seen in this Moderately Confused (AMS), is an editor’s nightmare, but one that fortunately has morphed out of control in tune with the technical revolution. I used to run honor role listings in the paper, and, for a while, I’d come across some ridiculous version of a common name and call the […]
I think today’s Deflocked (AMS) is largely an example of lead time. When the first cell phone bans in school were announced, editorial cartoonists leapt to depict disheartened children, though my own suspicion was that the kids would largely shrug it off and either adjust to life in the here and now or find new […]
Ben (MWAM) raises the issue of comic sands, albeit imperfectly. Assuming he dug holes deep enough so only the boys’ shoulders and heads were out, and only wide enough to fit them exactly, they could indeed be stuck. However, comic strips often feature people buried lying down who are then unable to get out from […]
You’re showing your age, Barry Blitt. I, too, remember the horror we felt learning that the French considered Jerry Lewis a comic genius. It was back in the days of Richard Pryor and Firesign Theater, slightly after Shelly Berman and Lenny Bruce, back when Monty Python made skits spoofing DH Lawrence and having communist theorists […]
Non Sequitur (AMS) manages to strike an appropriate note through serendipity, given Wiley’s lead time. Indeed, things could have gone worse and, also indeed, fate is recalculating. In any case, the second day of political cartoons about the attempted assassination have mostly indicated that we should give cartoonists a little more time, so we’ll back […]
Best way to shut me up is to draw the perfect cartoon. Too Much Coffee Man has done just that. Fortunately, the effect is temporary. Matt Golding usually ends up in political cartoon postings, but this one is purely social, and let’s note that obnoxious people with leaf blowers are blowing leaves Down Under. Up […]
David Ostow is right, and so was my professor, all those years ago. We were reading Hamlet and he led off the day’s discussion by asking what purpose the gravediggers’ scene served. Being sophomores, we knew everything, so we chattered away about rising and falling action and the need for comic relief in a tense […]
Pickles (AMS) offers a lovely example of tightrope walking, with a gag that its audience will get, even if they aren’t all that computer literate, but with a wink as well to any cyberly-literate types. “According to my research” is a key phrase for identifying crap thrown together by Artificial Intelligence, the confirming step being […]
Yesterday was Factchecking Day, which makes me wish Steve Kelley (Creators)’s cartoon had run then, because it’s an easy one to fact-check: March 31 was established as International Transgender Day of Visibility in 2009, so there was no “blunder” in the White House issuing a proclamation saying so, as they issue proclamations for all sorts […]
Bizarro (KFS) strikes a nostalgic note, intentionally or not. I don’t think of Easter eggs as empty shells, but then I don’t think of them as this elaborately decorated, except in Eastern Europe where I doubt pysanky are mixed in with the candy. But it did remind me of being a tiny tot some 70 […]
Indeed it is, They Can Talk. The bears got up a little early this year and started getting into the bird feeders, which is their equivalent of socializing. We always get warned to take down our bird feeders this time of year, which I gather is because we don’t want to encourage the bears to […]
Remember that graffito that read “We are the people our parents warned us about?” Well, as Non Sequitur (AMS) points out, we are now the people we warned ourselves about. I miss the old days, but when I really think back, I realize that most of the fun things I did then fall under the […]