Caught in the May 9th New Yorker, this Tom Toro cartoon:
(#1)
A little slideshow on time adverbials and the times they refer to, understood figuratively.
Toro hasn’t appeared on this blog before, but he’s a prolific cartoonist with an ear for language and an inclination to play with classic cartoon memes (like the desert island or, as below, penguins and their discriminability).
From his website:
Tom Toro has been a cartoonist for The New Yorker since 2010. He’s had over 140 cartoons published by the magazine since then [and submitted a great many more]. His work has also appeared in The Harvard Business Review, Narrative, Audubon and The Funny Times. Tom was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he graduated valedictorian from high school and then went to Yale University, earning a degree cum laude in Cinema Studies. He attended NYU Graduate Film School, shooting movies that premiered at Sundance, Tribeca and Cannes. In addition to the visual arts, Tom is a prolific writer, currently working on his third novel manuscript and several children’s picture books, as well as the ubiquitous screenplay. Nowadays he lives in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife, kid and cat.
Two more language-related cartoons, plus the promised penguin gag:
(#2)
On zero plurals in English (one fish, two fish; one deer, two deer; one moose, two moose). Well, people play with mooses (analogous to one noose, two nooses) and even meese (analogous to one goose, two geese). (Plus nice word/thing play in “what our plural is”.)
(#3)
Name play: a (thinking, talking) submarine hungry for a (metaphorically named) submarine sandwich.
(#4)
The conceit is that while all penguins look alike to us, to other penguins, every one is a distinguishable individual, with its own characteristics (beauty, in this case).
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