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.
In the February issue of Funny Times, this cartoon by political cartoonist Taylor Jones:
The third figure in the progression is Bruce Jenner, the fourth Caitlin Jenner.
Some words about Caitlin Jenner, and then a few on the Ascent of Man cartoon meme.
It started innocently enough, with a Jack Ziegler cartoon in the January 11th New Yorker:
(#1)
Captain Ahab, identifiable through his peg leg and harpoon, is apparently looking for his whale in a book store (where he will, no doubt, find copies of Moby-Dick, but no whales). Of course, the cartoon isn’t comprehensible if you don’t know the outlines of the story, but more than that, Ahab and the White Whale have become stock figures in popular culture, and, indeed, a conventional theme of gag cartoons: a cartoon meme.
I then went to search on {Ahab cartoon}, so that I could justify the claim that there was such a meme, and was inundated with examples. In fact, I was inundated with examples from the New Yorker alone, including two more by Jack Ziegler. I stopped collecting them when I had 10 single-panel cartoons plus a New Yorker cover. God only knows how many more there are.
