Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Bizarro (another Piraro/Wayno collaboration):

(#1)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

To understand the strip, you need to recognize the customer at the bar and know that finding him is a difficult enterprise; and to fully enjoy the strip, you should probably also recognize the cultural trope of the drinker at a bar who has the bartender tell people looking for him — most characteristically, his wife — that he’s not there and they haven’t seen him. (Call it the Toper in Hiding trope. The toper in hiding is a stock figure in jokes, situation comedies, and cartoons.)

The young man in cap, glasses, and striped shirt is the central figure in the Where’s Wally / Waldo? children’s books, where the reader’s task is to find the figure in a crowded drawing. If you don’t recognize Wally (British) / Waldo (American), you can’t understand the cartoon. Discussion in a 8/3/13 posting of mine with a section on the character: illustrations in #5-#7, these two Paul Noth cartoons in #3 and #4:

(#2) Drinker at the bar

(#3) The betrayed spouse

And then in an earlier Bizarro, of 2/22/15, on the ambiguity of lost:

(#4)

This entry was posted on February 17, 2018 at 3:59 am and is filed under Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding 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.