Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The great wave of meta-cartooning, in which characters in a cartoon recognize in some way that they are, in fact, in a cartoon, continues, as Robert Coren noted in a comment on my posting on yesterday’s Zippy. Here I’m going to reproduce the two strips from Robert’s comment (both from yesterday), mostly because (so far as I can tell from my records) I haven’t posted about them before. So, an Arlo and Janis and an Adam@Home:

(#1)

(#2)

Unlike my other postings this morning, shirtless men will not come into it. That is, this posting is shirtlessnessless.

In #1, the characters talk about the way the strip proceeds. In #2, they talk about the visual conventions of the comics (as Zippy did in yesterday’s strip).

Zippy has been going meta for many years, and Doonesbury dips into the genre every so often. Not long ago, I posted about a sequence of Pearls Before Swine strips in which the characters (including the cartoonist) commented on their cartoonness, and also posted a meta-Bizarro and then a meta-Mother Goose and Grimm.

On the comic strips above, from Wikipedia:

Arlo and Janis is a comic strip written and drawn by Jimmy Johnson. It is a leisurely paced domestic situation comedy. It was first published in newspapers on July 29, 1985.

The focus of the strip is tightly on its two title characters, a middle-aged, middle-class baby boomer couple with an easygoing approach to life. (link)

Adam@Home (previously titled Adam) is a syndicated comic strip created by Brian Basset and currently drawn by Rob Harrell. Started in 1984, it follows the life of Adam Newman, a stay-at-home dad, as he juggles his family and career. Originally focusing on office-place humor, the comic’s tone shifted when Adam became a stay-at-home consultant. (link)

This entry was posted on July 11, 2013 at 9:23 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.