Archive for the ‘Cartoonists’ Category

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Groucho glasses for 12/3

December 3, 2024

… the better to see the coming five days

The inspiration for this posting is Tom Toro’s cover “Incognito” for the New Yorker‘s 12/2/24 issue:


(#1) Farm turkeys in pre-Thanksgiving disguise; turkeys (which are not especially clever creatures) apparently believe that no one will see past their Groucho glasses, so that rather than experiencing a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block, they’ll be offered a cigar

So #1 is a big holiday ball of American pop culture; I wonder what your random Japanese, Turk, or Indonesian would make of it, even if you gave them the artists’s title as a clue.

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Posted in Anniversaries, Art, Cartoonists, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

For the quiet room, the loudest food

August 9, 2024

An Asher Perlman cartoon in the 8/12 issue of the New Yorker — deliberately contrived so as to present a puzzle in cartoon understanding:


(#1) Where are we? Who are those guys? What’s “the quiet room”? What’s “the loudest food on the planet”, and why would anyone want a bucket of it?

I ask these questions because it took me a while to get the cartoon; I was just baffled at first, distracted (as Perlman no doubt wanted me to be) by “the quiet room” and “the loudest food”, and so missed the counter with things for sale under it, and the machine with bits of stuff shooting into the air … oh, a popcorn machine! And then it all fell into place.

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Posted in Books, Cartoonists, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Sparky Schulz and the least of us

August 7, 2024

(Not my intention for a posting today, but you work with what you get, and I happened to have a piece of (what I think of as) Jesus’s DEI Sermon sitting on my desktop, waiting for a suitable occasion. Which came this morning in a lead from Henry Mensch on Facebook that took me to a website of Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz’s widow Jean; from Jean Schulz’s Blog “The Circle Continues”, on 2/23/19:

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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Everything Nancy

July 18, 2024

Released on the 9th, a cartoon feast of a volume from Sunday Press (in Palo Alto), distributed by Fantagraphics: The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller by Peter Maresca and Brian Walker:


(#1) The cover: all about Nancy — but Sluggo’s not far away, and Ernie’s hovering over them both

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Posted in Art, Books, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

A triumph of the well-prepared subconscious

July 12, 2024

A follow-up to my 7/10 posting “Their satanic majesties re-imagined”, which was

A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in “Cu Co Ni & Zn!”, a strip depicting Wayno’s vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band


(#1) Wayno’s character Zn

… rather than a simple caricature of KFK [Kerry Fucking King — his self-chosen epithet — of the thrash metal band Slayer],


(#2) The actual KFK, complete with the sign of the horns

in Zn Wayno has created a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined — a nicer, more Wayno-friendly — rock star, as a kind of homage to the original. Discarding the original’s less savory characteristics (rather than exaggerating them), and so salvaging a vision of what KFK could have been. A lot less Slayer and a lot more Led Zeppelin.

(Orthogonal to all this, my posting also looked at the details of Wayno’s cartooning style)

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Posted in Art, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Music | Leave a Comment »

One of Hilburn’s puns of steel

May 7, 2024

In Pinterest this morning, Scott Hilburn’s Argyle Sweater comic strip of 9/25/20:


(#1) This from the creator of the Puns of Steel collections

#1 is a still from a sad tale of chickpeas smashed to death in a cheap Baltimore apartment, an episode of the tv drama Hummuscide: Life on the Street; meanwhile, death strikes down a rich legume in the novel The Great Garbanzo, in which the title character is murdered by a distraught husband. The grand fictions of Cicer arietinum.

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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »

Jason Lloyd’s cartoon gay world

May 4, 2024

(or maybe his gay cartoon world. either way, this posting gets right into men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain talk, so it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

Encountered on Pinterest some time ago, an item from the Jason Lloyd Art website, with a work much like this one, two men in the act (but without a visible penis, so I can show it to you here):


(#1) “Just Relax” — I think Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1983 hit song is an inevitable association here — is about taking pleasure in getting fucked, and it’s in JL’s least cartoonish and most realistic (but soft-focus) style, which can be either simply erotic (and touching) or actually pornographic (and arousing), depending on how you approach it

All of JL’s work is at least somewhat simplified in its lines, and most of it is straightforwardly cartooning, all of it skilled, some of it notable.

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Posted in Captions, Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Male art | 2 Comments »

The Evolution of the Upright Bass

November 25, 2023

The title of a Sara Lautman cartoon in the New Yorker issue of 10/27/23:


(#1) The instrument emerges from the primordial ooze, climbs onto land, and ascends, eventually to stand upright at the pinnacle of evolution

Two things here: the musical instrument; and the cartoonist.

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Posted in Cartoonists, Evolution, Linguistics in the comics, Music | 3 Comments »

Wise Man

August 30, 2023

Thoughts provoked by John Baker’s comments on my posting yesterday “The back-to-school cartoon”, about this Brendan Loper cartoon:


(#1) I noted that “the original seer-consulting cartoon”, in the New Yorker of 12/5/22, had a different caption

JB commented:

For a second, by “original seer-seeking cartoon,” I thought you meant the first ever such cartoon. Any idea how this trope began? Is it primarily a New Yorker thing?

My response, and some notes from my files on the cartoon meme in question.

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Posted in Cartoonists, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The flightless kite

July 27, 2023

It’s definitely Penguin Day on AZBlog — following on my earlier “Illusory penguins ” posting — with this wonderful wordless Jared Nangle cartoon in the new New Yorker,  for 7/31:


(#1) The kite inherits its flightlessness from its subject; bird kites and butterfly kites can fly, but not penguin kites (meanwhile, a kite that could dive and swim like a fish would certainly be a disappointment)

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Posted in Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

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