Arnold Zwicky's Blog

… and on comic conventions. Following up on my 8/26/22 posting“Moon Over Palo Alto”, on my 82nd birthday, with reminiscences of 1982: from Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County Facebook site, posted yesterday (my thanks to George V. Reilly on FB today):

(#1) 🐧 Opus tries to get in to see an R-rated shark-from-space archaeologist-adventure flick (a nearly naked Indiana Jones does battle with the Sharknado from Mars) — hoping, perhaps, for some intense violence (disembowelments!), or at least for the whiff of sex (a little skin!)

[BB on the strip for:] July 13, 1982.  A good place to point out what often isn’t obvious to pop-culture fans: there had rarely been comic strip animals that talked to people.  Take a moment to consider this (I never did, not surprisingly).  In movies and comics, animals talked to each other… but hardly ever to us.  Aside from Bugs Bunny (slapstick license, one supposes) and Winnie the Pooh (the imagination of Christopher Robin), it remained, with very few exceptions, an invisible suspension of reality they never dared to go.  -bb

FB commenters noted passing animal-human exchanges in various strips, but Opus interacts with humans as a matter of course. Though he’s a penguin, nothing human is alien to him. Or to his buddies of various species.

His cross-species amiability has reached new heights in the current story line, about his engagement to be married (to a (human) woman). Two recent strips:

The strip from 8/22:

(#2)

Pork brain bearnaise? Well, pork brain mayonnaise is a real thing. From the Food Republic site, “Use Your Brain, Make Chris Cosentino’s Brainaise”:

Nobody knows the inside of an animal quite like chef and meat enthusiast Chris Cosentino, who helms Cockscomb in San Francisco and restaurants in Portland and Napa. His latest cookbook, Offal Good, is a dense, delicious collection of recipes for his well-known favorite parts. If you’ve ever wanted to make the most impressive, pumped-up mayonnaise in the entire business, Cosentino’s brainaise is where it’s at. [AZ: you can do it with cow or pig; the site gives a recipe for the pig version]

The strip from 8/26:

(#3) Note the 🐧 XING sign

This entry was posted on August 29, 2022 at 9:41 am and is filed under Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Pop culture. 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.