In the world of annually recurring dates, Wednesday was Earth Day, Thursday was St. George’s Day, and tomorrow is World Penguin Day. Into this olla podrida of holidays walk a pastor, a priest, a rabbi, and a pie-throwing clown working as an erotic masseur.
Colby Jones, cartooning as Sir Colby, with a meta Walk Into Bar joke; and Bob Eckstein, offering the comic amalgam of clown and masseur.
The following cartoon, in French and unattributed, has been making its way around Facebook in the last few days:
(#1) “How do you [polite] feel this week?” – “Much better.”
Therapist and patient, both cowering in the anxiety of persecution. But this week is better. Much better.
Presumably, it’s being passed around as a pointed commentary on the fix we are all in currently. Even better is appalling.
It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that #1 is a rip-off of a Bizarro cartoon: the drawing style, the content (the Psychiatrist meme is a Bizarro evergreen favorite), the two odd Dan Piraro symbols. And so it is, from 2/15/11, almost a decade ago.
Yesterday’s Weekly Humorist cartoon “Missing Something?” by Bob Eckstein:
(#1) In the Godzilla cartoon meme, saurian movie monsters exhibit their famous appetite for pieces of the urban landscape, especially mass transit vehicles
But a bus or train with no passengers inside is like the hollow shell of a chocolate candy, with no nuts, no buttercream, no nougat, no candied cherry, nothing whatsoever in it. Or like the two chocolate biscuits of an Oreo cookie just rubbing together, with no creme filling.
The 4/13 Rhymes With Orange brings us the Grim Reaper and his cats (we know from Terry Pratchett that Death is fond of cats):
(#1)
We don’t know if this Grim Reaper is a general operator, reaping souls of many creatures, including mice; or whether this one is a specialist in mice — perhaps of a tribe, or race, of Grim Mousers; or of a professional guild of them. (See below, on the Death of Rats.)
Bob Eckstein today in Wired:
(#1) The Sísyphùs of the corónavìrus, always at his labors
A natural cartoon idea, which many have latched onto.
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo is also a cartoon meme combo: Desert Island + Psychiatrist:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page.)
You notice the empty clinical couch, with its colorful pillow, because it’s the biggest thing in the drawing, and it’s right in the middle of it. You notice the psychiatrist, because he’s a human figure, of some size, with a significant face (our attention is drawn powerfully to faces).
Only then do you follow the therapist’s gaze and take in the little figure in the lower righthand corner: the tiny castaway under a miniature palm tree, on a desert island — charmingly presented as being in a colorful planter, so that it’s also one of the plants in routine office decor, matched by the ornamental foliage in the planter in the opposite corner.
We are both in a Desert Island cartoon and also in a Psychiatrist cartoon (where the therapist is doing shrink-talk), set in a stereotypical psychiatrist’s office (notably medical, down to the framed diplomas on the wall).
The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro of 3/25 returns us to Restaurant Row in Anteaterville:
(#1) The chef of Chez Le Fourmilier brings an ant farm to the table for the delectation of an enthusiastic diner wearing an ant bib (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
(Yes, “Higashi Day cartoon 3: sentence-initial anymore” is still on its way; it’s just turned out to be gigantic.)
From various Facebook sources, a JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein) cartoon on his Twitter site on 1/10/18, now, ouch, virally popular as most of the world is obliged to work from home:
(#1) Appreciate his facial expression
The last two panels of the Doonesbury for March 8th, one of Trudeau’s pointedly political strips, about people whose reputations have been soiled by their association with Helmet Grabpussy: what does it mean if you turn up as a character in a comic strip (especially this strip)?
Oh, so meta: not only do the two men — a now-grey-haired Mark Slackmeyer and an aging Mike Doonesbury — recognize that they are not entirely real people, but (despite their many apparently real-life experiences) also characters in a comic strip, they further recognize that indubitably real people, people from Meatworld (like Alan Dershowitz) can join them in Stripworld — and that when such a person materializes in Stripworld, it’s usually as an object of mockery. As Mike says, “that’s never good”.
Here at Ramona Electronica, the cartoons have been piling up haphazardly, making awkward barriers to even the smallest simulated movements around the labyrinth of virtual rooms. So now, a modest effort at house-clearing — to celebrate March 15th: Higashi Day, formerly known in these parts as (spring) Removal Day, marking the day when, for roughly 10 years in the fabled past, Jacques and I set off to car-trek east, from Palo Alto (and Stanford) to Columbus OH (and Ohio State).
(Its winter counterpart is December 15th, Nishi Day, marking the send-off for the corresponding trip west, from Columbus to Palo Alto.)
I note that, ominously, March 15th is also — oh, Julio! — the Ides of March, but that the preceding day is that edibly mathematical event Pi Day and that only two days later comes the spring green of St. Patrick’s Day (which J and I experienced annually on the road in northern Arizona).
The inaugural Higashi Day cartoon is by Harry Bliss, in the March 9th New Yorker. But first — surely you saw this coming — a note on compass directions in Japanese.
