The 12/5/17 One Big Happy, which came by in my comics feed a few days ago:
(#1)
Three things here: Ruthie’s eggcornish reshaping of the unfamiliar word census (ending in /s/) as the familiar senses (ending in /z/); her tooken as the PSP of the verb take; and (in the last panel) her use of take ‘tolerate, stand, endure’ (here with the modal can of ability and also negation; and with the pronominal object this).
Today’s Zippy, a follow-up to yesterday’s:
(#1)
Yesterday, “Between Parody and Pastiche”, with the Zippy title “The Long Corn Rye” (The Long Goodbye). Today’s title: “Farewell, Ned Smedley” (Farewell, My Lovely). This time, I’m focused on just one thing, the clicking / ticking sound effect at the end, toketa toketa toketa, which takes me not to Chandler but to Thurber, in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”.
In today’s Zippy, our Pinhead seeks signs … in signs, specifically at the West Motel, on Historic Lincoln Highway, 4040 Columbia Avenue, Columbia PA:
(#1)
Lord, give me a sign! he cries. And as Zippy watches the West Motel sign, searching for something to believe in, there comes a sign: the NO of NO VACANCY blinks on; Zippy is no longer vacant.
Plays on the ambiguity of sign and on the ambiguity of vacant.
Yesterday’s Zippy has a flat 2-d version of the Pinhead on a bench in earnest conversation with a similarly flat female figure (not at all Pinhead-like):
(#1)
The question is: what is that female figure, with its diamond cut-out just below the neck?
I got no connection, and was unable to get Google Images to see the figure as anything but a tree (despite my attempts to brush out the greenery). Symbols for women’s toilets have round heads rather than trapezoidal ones, and have no cutouts. Google searches for female figures with diamond cutouts pulled up some dresses with such cutouts:
(#2) Nicholas black diamond cut out gown
and some Wonder Woman images:
(#3) Wonder Woman cartoon, with abdominal cutout
but nothing like the figure in #1.
On the chance that the figure was actually a public artwork or a type of bench or chair with the female figure on it, I tried several more searches, but was led instead to some really interesting public/street art and ultimately to the Museum Kampa in Prague in my last post, where I found some unexpected penguins (but no women with diamond-shaped cutouts).
So I throw myself on my readership of this blog (and Facebook and Google+). Anyone recognize the figure?
The 1/1/18 New Yorker cover, by George Booth:
(#1)
To come: about this cover; Booth covers for the holidays; the metaphorical idiom elephant in the room and its exploitation by artists and cartoonists.
From Kim Darnell on Facebook:
Surely I am not the first comic geek to study linear algebra who looked at the symbol for direct sums [see here] and thought, “That’s just the symbol for the X-Men rotated 45 degrees.”
This, of course, makes me wonder what superpowers the mutant known as Direct Sum would have.
There are, in fact, Unicode symbols for “circled plus” (used for the Direct Sum operator) and also “circled times” (though I’m not clear on what operator the latter is used for):
⊕ ⊗ vs. + ×
(There will be implied or allusive steamy mansex, in addition to heavy man-on-man romance, affection, kissing, cuddling, and all that good stuff. A little bit of linguistics at the end. But perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Some Sterek slash art, involving the characters Stiles and Derek from the tv show Teen Wolf — introduced here in a posting on to kitchen-kiss and leading (in a posting to come) to more discussion of bromances, the bromance between the actors Dylan O’Brien (who plays Stiles) and Tyler Hoechlin (who plays Derek) being a case in point.
(#1) Sterek Pride
In my mail from Bonnie Bendon Campbell, a pointer to a Maggie Larson cartoon in the 12/4 New Yorker and to Michael Maslin’s Inkspill column about that issue:
(#1) From the 12/4/17 New Yorker, the first issue with more women artists than men
Zippy continues his visit to North Carolina — yesterday Salisbury, today Charlotte — with Xmas pleasure and puzzlement about the antique technologies of pen and paper:
(#1)
The public art work is The Writer’s Desk (2005, by Larry Kirkland) at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library: a bronze quill pen in an inkwell at the top of a stack of books, surrounded by typewriter keys, pencils, and hand stamps.
