Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro supplies another Psychiatrist-meme cartoon in the strip’s pattern, this time with a cat patient yearning to shred furniture, as cats will do:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

The Bizarro Psychiatrist pattern. From my 1/1/22 posting “Our frugal cartoonists”:

It’s about re-using resources. In particular, re-using cartoon artwork for fresh purposes — a regular practice in (among the strips I follow regularly) Zippy the Pinhead and Bizarro. In Zippy, it’s mostly re-texting an old strip; but in Bizarro, it’s mostly assembling a strip from a collection of standard components arranged in a standard abstract pattern — rather like a syntactic construction.

The topic for [today]: assembling a Bizarro Psychiatrist strip.

With 14 examples, among them strips with, as patients, the Big Bad Wolf, a parrot, a dog, and a mosquito. And now, in #1, a cat.

Shreddy Cougar. My title is a play on Freddy Krueger, the name of the movie character. From Wikipedia:

(#2) The night slasher (photo from the Freddy Krueger Facebook site)

Freddy Krueger is a fictional character in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. He first appeared in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) as the spirit of a serial killer who uses a gloved hand with razors to kill his victims in their dreams, causing their deaths in the real world as well. In the dream world, he is a powerful force and almost completely invulnerable. However, whenever Freddy is pulled into the real world, he has normal human vulnerabilities and can be destroyed. The character was created by Craven and was consistently portrayed by Robert Englund in the original film series as well as in the television spin-off.

Back to the cat. From the Showbiz Cheat Sheet site on “How Wes Craven worked ‘primal fears’ into Freddy Krueger’s design”:

Freddy’s razor glove has become one of the most iconic images in horror history. Although the razor glove is famous, it has humble origins. Specifically, the book Friday the 13th reports Craven watched his cat claw his couch one night and that moment inspired Freddy’s glove. Craven wanted the glove to play on humanity’s primal fears.

That cat on the couch: beloved pet or remorseless killer?

This entry was posted on February 24, 2022 at 7:42 am and is filed under Comic conventions, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv. 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.