Today’s morning name: Caran d’Ache. A Swiss art supplies company specializing in pencils. With a complex linguistic and social history behind its name. There will be cartoons as well. (No food, sex, music, or plants, but you can’t have everything. On the other hand, there will be clowns and some chemistry / materials science.)
(#1) The box for a 40-color selection of pencils, proudly flying the Swiss flag
Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collab:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Not one, but two portmanteaus: for the ailment, overemotion sickness = overemotional + motion sickness; and for the treatment, Melodramamine = melodrama + Dramamine. Plus the (melo)dramatic gesture.
In the 7/30 strip, on the ambiguity of the word letter; in the 7/31 strip, a play on the name of the letter Y:
(#1)
(#2)
From the Pun Based Humor Facebook page (ultimate source not identified):
(#1)
A photograph (composed and posed for humorous effect), but if you drew this scene, it would straightforwardly be a (captionless) cartoon, so why shouldn’t this count as a cartoon too? Not your prototypical cartoon, but a cartoon nevertheless.
An analogy would be to the art work of Pierre et Gilles: photographs elaborately composed and posed for artistic effect (often humorous effect as well), and meant as a photographic equivalent of a fantasy painting or drawing.
Meanwhile, there’s the matter of cartoon understanding: the young man, the box of breakfast cereal (Kix brand), and the highway route sign (for US Route 66) are the three elements focused on in the photograph, but what’s funny about that? Is it relevant that the route is historic, or that it’s a loop, or that the young man’s belt end is dangling (something to do with loops, maybe)? Or maybe stuff in the background is subtly significant. Or the setting, on a town street, at an intersection with a crosswalk.
That’s the portmanteau in yesterday’s Luann strip:
voluminous + voluptuous, probably with a bit of sumptuous mixed in — but certainly ample heft combined with sensuousness. Not a waif, and not any typical fashion model.
Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collab:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The disaster to be averted:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
Meanwhile, HD is bedeviled. From NOAD:
verb bedevil: [a] (of something bad) cause great and continual trouble to: inconsistencies that bedevil modern English spelling. [b] (of a person) torment or harass: he bedeviled them with petty practical jokes.
A Tom Gauld New Scientist cartoon:
(#1) (Hat tip to Chris Waigl)
Gauld’s version starts with real hazard pictograms and then veers into the fanciful.
(Note: the DEPRESSING pictogram is a black cloud, not a version of the poop emoji.)
It appeared on Facebook today, with this note from Chris Hansen:
(#1) CH: From another list we have a cartoon that takes a heckuva lot of background knowledge to understand. Arnold may want to deconstruct it, if he hasn’t already. I don’t know the cartoonist.
Well, I certainly wanted to deconstruct it, but not without knowing who the artist was. Quickly, however, Chris himself, Brian Guerrero-Kane, and Roger Phillips all supplied that information — Leigh Rubin (who has a Page on this blog) — and led me to fuller versions of the cartoon, with a title that considerably aids understanding. But the stripped-down version in #1, though challenging, is soluble, so I’ll do that first.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm takes us through the murky realms of cartoon understanding:
(#1)
At the surface level, the fortune teller offers a preposterous prediction about how Grimm will be reincarnated, and Grimm says he doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Entirely comprehensible (so long as you know about fortune tellers, and can recognize a stereotype of one — woman in gypsy costume with crystal ball — and so long as you know what reincarnation is), but not funny, unless you also know about Carnation brand evaporated milk (sweetened powdered milk that comes in cans). It’s a joke, son.
