Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In today’s (1/2/22) Bizarro, the Old Balloon Peddler hawks his wares in the park:

(#1) And thought balloons too! Take a word or thought ride in one of these sturdy inflatable delights (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

The Magical Adventure Balloon Ride
— a private basket adventure exclusively for thrill seekers

He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientele

There’s a Page on this blog on my postings about speech/word balloons/bubbles in cartoons; three highlights from that inventory:

— my 3/30/19 posting “How to use your balloons”, a Bizarro cartoon on such balloons treated as physical objects for use:

(#2)

— in my 8/2/19 posting “Never go out without a speech balloon”, a Zippy treating balloons as physical objects you can take with you:

(#3)

— and in my 5/22/21 posting “Up, up, and away”,  a Pearls Before Swine cartoon (with a Family Circus finale):

(#4)

one of a species in which speech balloons are treated as physical objects in the characters’ context, objects that contain the words the characters say, words that the characters can see and read … — and simultaneously are treated as lighter-than-air flotation devices that will rise in the air and carry objects with them

Sources. First, the Magical Adventure Balloon Ride, and its “private basket adventure exclusively for thrill seekers”: Magical Adventure Balloon Rides of Temecula CA (“centrally located between Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside, and Palm Springs”), link here.

And then the Old Balloon Peddler, a riff on “The Old Dope Peddler”; from Wikipedia:

This entry was posted on January 2, 2022 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Play. 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.