Arnold Zwicky's Blog

It starts with a paper by Elizabeth Closs Traugott (with my assistance) at the recent International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, on metatext in the cartoon xkcd (full set of slides linked to here). After Elizabeth gave the paper, she got a comment from someone asking if she knew of a comic strip with mouse-over texts and further texts that emerge from inside those mouse-overs (another layer of cartoon complexity beyond those I have written about) — a daily or weekly strip with a name that Elizabeth thinks had green and egg in it, but of course wasn’t Green Eggs and Ham.

I’ve now been trying to track down this mystery strip, but without success, mostly because Dr. Seuss keeps getting in the way. But I’ve come up with seven interesting new cartoons for your entertainment.

Note: yes, Elizabeth should have written the name down, or gotten the name of the commenter (who was not someone familiar to her), but things tend to be rushed and chaotic at these giant conferences, so it’s easy to slip. Now I’m hoping that someone will recognize the strip from her description (which I’ve paraphrased above).

Ham and eggs, but no green. First exhibit:

(#1)

ToonDoo is the “World’s fastest way to create cartoons!” — a site that provides software for people to create and title their own cartoons, under pseudonyms (like “painter5”). And that’s all I know about #1.

Eggs, and incidentally something green. A delightful 2013 cartoon from the New Yorker‘s Ed Koren (discussion of the cartoonist on this blog here):

(#2)

The farm stand is run by the Green Mountain Girls, and it’s a real thing, in Northfield VT. The GMGs were delighted that Koren (who’s a regular customer) got them into the New Yorker.

Then comes the Seuss deluge. Previously on this blog, a 10/22/14 posting about the book Green Eggs and Ham and cartoon uses of it, notably in a mashup of Dr. Seuss and the Muppets.

Then a Savage Chickens (inventory here), a Scott Hilburn (inventory here), and a Sheldon (by Dave Kellett; previous posting here):

(#3)

(#4)

(#5)

On the political beat. GE&H has been mined repeatedly by editorial cartoonists. Here are two on Obamacare: “Green Eggs and Ham” by Bill Day on 9/27/13 on The Cagle Post site; and “Green Eggs and Obamacare” by Pat Bagley on 9/25/13 in the Salt Lake Tribune:

(#6)

(#7)

GE&H is adaptable for other purposes, of course.

This entry was posted on August 4, 2015 at 5:20 am and is filed under Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Quotations. 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.