… and they’ll use the old cartoon artwork for another strip, with fresh text: a new, improved donut. Case in point: today’s (12/30, New Year’s Eve Eve) Zippy strip:
(#1) The big donut by the side of the road in York PA, advertising Maple Donuts, its store, and its coffee shop
But, but: we’ve been here before; #1 is a reworking of the Zippy strip in my 12/1/17 posting “Maple Donuts, coffee shops, and unapologetic identities”, with the old artwork merely re-colored but with fresh speech balloons:
That would be old original Z-Man, who is now (according to today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip) your flight-empowered guide into the pop-cultural past:
(#1) The first of (at least) three incarnations of Z-Man since he entered the Zippyverse in 2005
As a Z-person, I am especially attentive to words with Z in them (like whizz), especially names (like Buzz and Graz), especially names beginning with Z (like Zelda, Zorn, and Zorro). So Zippy and his superhero Z-Man characters catch my eye and get my attention, independently of the absurdist attractions of the strip (and, in the case of #1, without regard for my appreciation of the Marx Brothers, Ida Lupino, and Daffy Duck).
From Japanese-born New York artist Naruki Kukita, an art-world three-way: hunky men (some from gay porn) displaying their bodies collide with kawaii-cute manga figures to pose in canonical settings of Western high art (especially on mythological and religious themes). I came across this fine example of Kukitart on Pinterest yesterday:
(#1) John the Baptist (2023), amidst the Disneyoid creatures of the forest
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with yet another instance of the Ahab and the Whale cartoon meme:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Moby and Ahab certainly are a troubled couple. Wayno’s title for the strip: “Captain Clingy”.
In the 9/21 issue of the New Yorker, this Lila Ash cartoon “Evolution of Man”:
(#1) New Yorker description of the cartoon: The evolution of man from a fish to a human throwing their phone in the water, and swimming in to retrieve it.
Yet another variation on the Ascent of Man theme; there have been so many of these on this blog that there’s a Page cataloguing them, here.
Circulating on Facebook (and many other sites) recently, this penguinocalypse cartoon:
(#1)
I call this a cartoon because it’s a marriage of a quite specific text with a quite specific image, circulated as humor. In fact, I haven’t been able to find this text without this image, or this image without this text (right down to the illegible credit in the lower right-hand corner). Nor have I found any variants of this text, or any variants of this image. #1 is a unique artistic creation, just like the other cartoons I post about here — of the subtype in which the image is taken from some other source (in this case, it’s a photoshopped carnivore penguin) rather than drawn by the creator. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover who the creator was.
On Language Log on October 5th, Mark Seidenberg, “Cartoonist walks into a language lab”:
[Bob] Mankoff’s involvement in humor research isn’t a joke. He almost completed a Ph.D. in experimental psychology back in the behaviorist era, which is pretty hard core. Before he left the field he co-authored a chapter called “Contingency in behavior theory”, as in contingencies of reinforcement in animal learning. The chapter included this cartoon:
(#1)
… was a banner day for cartoons in the New Yorker. Waiting a few minutes to get called in for routine blood tests at the Palo Alo Medical Foundation this morning, I chanced upon this particular issue of the magazine and found five cartoons of interest for this blog (plus some others I enjoyed but had no special interest here); all five were from artists already familiar on this blog.
Yesterday’s Bizarro, way meta:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one — see this Page.)
The conceit here is that the characters that appear in comic strips are in fact actors playing roles, so that they can go on strike (among other things). Even more, when the actors are absent, the activities in the strips just go on without them, as if the actors had simply become invisible. Invisible waiter (on strike) takes order from invisible diner (also on strike).
It’s not called Bizarro for nothing.
It starts with a single-panel gag cartoon in the April 2016 Funny Times:
(#1)
First, things you need to know to get this cartoon. Then, information about cartoonist and graphic novelist Peter Kuper and his other work.
