Idiomatic meta-strips

In today’s crop of cartoons, an outrageous Pearls Before Swine and a silly Mother Goose and Grimm, both of them meta-strips and both playing with idioms:

(#1)

(#2)

In #1, the characters are treating pieces of wood to psychological pressure, which moves Rat to bash the cartoonist with one of the pieces of wood.

From OED3 (March 2007):

pressure-treated: Of timber: impregnated with a preservative applied under pressure.

[first cite] 1928   Iowa Recorder 12 Sept. 5/2,   $5 buys a twelve foot pressure treated hog trough that will last you a ‘lifetime’.

In #2, we have the cartoon character Charlie Brown (visiting from another comic strip) on the couch of a psychiatrist who’s reassuring the boy about good grief. Charlie Brown is famous for using the (American) exclamatory idiom Good grief!

(#3)

From the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms (2003) on good grief:

I am very surprised “I have four computers at home” “Good grief. What do you do with them all?”

Usage notes: often used humorously, when someone pretends that a situation is more serious than it really is: Good grief, look at all this food! Are you feeding an army?

One Response to “Idiomatic meta-strips”

  1. More meta-cartoons | Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:

    […] (including the cartoonist) commented on their cartoonness, and also posted a meta-Bizarro and then a meta-Mother Goose and […]

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