Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The cartoon caption contest in the latest (March 12th) New Yorker:

The Grim Reaper laid to rest.

The Grim Reaper is a well-worn cartoon meme, amply illustrated in postings on this blog. Startlingly, a cartoon in which the Grim Reaper is himself reaped appeared just two weeks ago in the New Yorker, from artist Mick Stevens; see my 2/23/18 posting “Death’s end”. In that posting, I associated the cartoon with a line from an Isaac Watts text in a Sacred Harp song: “And death itself shall die” (holding out the promise of eternal life after earthly death).

Now to come: in next week’s magazine, three finalist captions for the Weyant drawing, for readers to vote on; and then a week later, the winner. Watch this space.

[Finalists from the March 26th issue:

“He touched so many lives.”

“I was hoping taxes would go first.”

“I guess his work finally caught up with him.”]

[And the winner, from the April 9th issue: “I was hoping taxes would go first.”]

This entry was posted on March 9, 2018 at 4:49 am and is filed under Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Music. 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.