Passed on by Tim Wilson on Facebook, this Danny Shanahan cartoon from 8/17/98, with Popeye and Bluto holding hands at a cocktail party, talking to a bemused woman:
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Background information: on Popeye; on repressed homosexuality; and on Danny Shanahan.
Today’s One Big Happy turns on names of types vs. names of individuals, in the world of cars:
Mercedes and Lexus are the names of types (makes) of cars. But you can easily give individual cars their own “personal” names, as many people do. Nothing illegal about using the same (Mercedes) or similar (Lexus / Lexis) names in the two cases, but yes, potentially misleading. (On the other hand, the type names are count nouns, and occur with determiners — a Mercedes — while the individual names are anarthrous — Mercedes — so the syntax normally disambiguates the senses.)
Bruce McCall’s cover for the February 2nd New Yorker:
The cover story:
“Last week, the staff of The New Yorker made its final preparations to leave 4 Times Square, its headquarters for the past fifteen years, to join the rest of Condé Nast, the parent company, down at 1 World Trade Center, the new megatower in lower Manhattan,” writes Nick Paumgarten in a Comment titled “Here.” The artist Bruce McCall pictures what it felt like to pack boxes while we were finishing the last issue in our old building.
A note on McCall, then some details from the cover.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
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That’s obviously no groundhog, but some kind of crocodile, so the strip works at one level. But that’s not just any crocodile; it’s one of the crocodiles from Stephan Pastis’s comic strip Pearls Before Swine. What makes this especially entertaining is that Pearls itself is exceptionally rich in cross-comic allusions.
In today’s One Big Happy, Ruthie once again understands a rare and unusual expression (the word comfit) in terms more familiar to her:
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I very much doubt that I knew the word comfit when I was 6.
In today’s Zippy, our Pinhead takes a road trip to Kansas:
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Hutchinson, Goodland, Cawker City, Lawrence, Wichita.
From the January 26th New Yorker, a cartoon by Liana Finck:
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A store that deals with things from highly general categories: it sells items, for which it takes money.
Found in the latest Funny Times, a Speed Bump cartoon from September 30th:
A distant pun (rehab – Ahab) that works only if you recognize both pieces of background: the story of Melville’s Moby-Dick and the conventions of talk therapy.
Yet another cartoon — this seems to be Cartoon Weekend — this time another one about proselytizing, following on the Phil Selby “We’d like to talk to you about cheeses” cartoon: a Tim Whyatt strip passed on to me by Michael Covarrubias:
A play on find Jesus: literal find ‘discover (someone or something) after a deliberate search’ (NOAD2) vs. the figurative find Jesus ‘develop a personal relationship with God’.
