In today’s Doonesbury, a new (and younger) audience confronts a stylistic quirk of some television hews reporting:
This time the participles (PRP, PSP) are pretty much a side issue, though their sense of urgency — I would say, rather, “immediacy” — appears right away, in panel 2.
In the June 2016 issue of Funny Times, a bit of language play, portmanteauing Oreos (referring to the brand of creme-filled chocolate cookie sandwiches) and areolas (referring to the rings of pigmented skin surrounding nipples):
(#1)
The artist, Jeff Hobbs, is new to this blog; he’s given to plays on words, however.
Continuing a Calvin and Hobbes theme from March (3/19/16, “Sugar bombs”, with links to earlier postings on sugary cereals in real life):
In the earlier posting, Calvin was eating Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. In today’s re-play of an old C&H, the brand name is Crunchy Sugar Bombs (it’s on the box). Presumably they’re sister Sugar Bomb varieties from the same manufacturer, along the lines of Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles from Post Cereals in real life.
Then there’s the idea of a hyperactive child as a method of birth control.
Today’s Zippy, returning to Pancake Circus, to trade geek compounds:
(#1)
Three things: the expressions being traded, which start out in panel 1 as N + N compounds from the tech world, both Ns monosyllables, and then get a bit more varied, but still with accent on the initial syllable (the default accentuation for compounds); the final expression, FlapJax, certainly referring to flapjacks (a U.S. synonym for pancakes, as fits the Pancake Circus context) but possibly also to the fictional character Jax from the Mortal Combat games (in line with the tenchnogeek theme); and the re-use of the visual material from another Zippy cartoon, now with different text.
That would be Lotte Reiniger, honored on June 1st by a wonderful Google Doodle:
This is just a screen capture. You can watch the actual video here. (Incidental note: I find the division of GOOGLE into GOO + GLE risible. More goo!)
In honor of the great pioneer of animated cartoons, Lotte Reiniger.
(This takes a turn to sexual politics that some — though not, I think, Bill Griffith — might find surprising.)
Today’s Zippy offers us some office soap opera between boss (Don) and employee (Ms. Carlisle), from the point of view of Ms. Carlisle:
(#1)
The topic is a familiar one in Zippyland: cartoonishness or cartooniness, indicated by various physical characteristics — noses, eyes, eyebrows, ears, jawlines, and mouths. In Zippyland, of course, everyone’s a cartoon character and they’re all dressed like one, but some of them are “realistic”, normal, regular folks,, while others are flagrantly cartoony.
Today’s Bizarro takes us back to the early days of language:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
But then there’s the circularity. Caveman A announces that he has thought of a word W with a novel property. But then he characterizes this property by using W. How can Caveman B understand this characterization if he’s unfamiliar with W?
(Meanwhile, of course, Caveman A talks in Cavemanese.)
(Talk of men’s bodies and male-male sex, but nothing actually incendiary, and the explicit images are in my posting “Memorial Day military porn” on AZBlogX, not here.)
I start with yesterday’s Frazz, for the holiday:
(Hat tip to Robert Coren.) In my AZBlogX posting you can see the Channel 1 Releasing / Dirk Yates tribute to Immoral Day, in pornstar flesh (represented there by DJ, or D.J., Carlton in the 2008 flick Duty Weekend) offered for sale to celebrate American military men, democracy, and capitalism. As for capitalism, every American holiday, no matter how solemn its purpose, has been bent to serve commerce, and Memorial Day is no exception; plus, if there’s stuff to be sold, the gay porn studios are hard on the case.
In today’s New York Times, an obituary “Frank Modell, Longtime New Yorker Cartoonist, Dies at 98” by Sam Roberts:
Frank Modell, a classically trained artist who contributed more than 1,400 cartoons to The New Yorker — customarily, he said, “of angry men and sexy women and dogs” — during an illustrious era for the magazine, died on Friday at his home in Guilford, Conn. He was 98 [born 9/6/17].
Women and dogs and the occasional clown.
On (US) Memorial Day Eve, this Dan Thompson Brevity cartoon passed on by Betsy Herrington on Facebook:
(#1)
A distant pun, with the original and the pun differing both segmentally and prosodically, but all that is surmounted if you know the original: Humphrey Bogart (caricatured in #1, in trenchcoat and fedora) to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: “Here’s looking at you, kid”.