It starts with a paper by Elizabeth Closs Traugott (with my assistance) at the recent International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, on metatext in the cartoon xkcd (full set of slides linked to here). After Elizabeth gave the paper, she got a comment from someone asking if she knew of a comic strip with mouse-over texts and further texts that emerge from inside those mouse-overs (another layer of cartoon complexity beyond those I have written about) — a daily or weekly strip with a name that Elizabeth thinks had green and egg in it, but of course wasn’t Green Eggs and Ham.
I’ve now been trying to track down this mystery strip, but without success, mostly because Dr. Seuss keeps getting in the way. But I’ve come up with seven interesting new cartoons for your entertainment.
Note: yes, Elizabeth should have written the name down, or gotten the name of the commenter (who was not someone familiar to her), but things tend to be rushed and chaotic at these giant conferences, so it’s easy to slip. Now I’m hoping that someone will recognize the strip from her description (which I’ve paraphrased above).
