The Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/24/18, with a fresh take on dogs to beware of: not vicious guard or attack dogs, but hyperkinetic emotional-support dogs overwhelming passing pedestrians by lavishing empathetic concern on them:
(#1) An especially nice touch is the dog saying — this is cartoonland, where animals talk, in English — that it can smell the hurt, the cluster of emotional states that give off markers that many dogs can in fact smell and interpret
Two cockroaches, you have a couple of unpleasant bugs. Undulating masses of cockroaches streaming over all the surfaces in a room, you’ve got a shudder-provoking pest infestation. (I’ve had the latter experience with Argentine ants, and it was the stuff of nightmares for weeks.) But when does the former turn into the latter? This is the question asked by self-aware cockroaches in this cartoon by Lonnie Millsap in the 1/29/24 print-edition New Yorker:
(#1) Cucarachas conscientes de ellas mismas, addressing the puzzle in the sorites paradox / the paradox of the heap
Now that I have the three Dinos books (Dinosaur Therapy, Dinosaur Philosophy, Dinosaur Friendship), I’ve found further poignant Dino strips about what I called deep friendship in my 1/8 posting “The best bits of me”. Deep friendship is also known as a kind of love: philia, the love that friends have for one another (as distinguished from eros, romantic or sexual love). That has brought me to strips in which two of the Dino characters are attached erotically as well as philically — notably, this delightful “big bed” strip from 2022, involving the two characters the creators refer to as red and blue (called Brn and Blu in my earlier posting):
(#1) Bed space is nice, but the embrace of your lover is even nicer
The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender the two characters; they differ in color, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance. This means that #1 can be — though it doesn’t have to be — understood as showing same-sex eros. With this remarkable result, as reported by the creators on Twitter (now called X) on 6/16/22:
this comic was too much for Instagram and they deleted it
Consequently, the strip didn’t come up in my earlier net searches, which turned out to depend on Instagram; I didn’t discover it until I got my copy of Dinosaur Friendship. I am offended.
Today’s Bizarro, a Sunday Punnies in which all the puns are incorporated in portmanteaus:
(#1) Three punmanteaus (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page)
Now each of them in detail, in turn. In each case, the pun comes in the material shared by the two contributors to the portmanteau — material that is understood one way as part of the first contributor and a different way as part of the second. And then the cartoon combines the two understandings in a single drawing: a (spiritually) aware werwolf (lupine zazen); ill-tempered tempered glass (oh shut up, Silica Boy!); and a matador doorman (the hand that stabs, the hand that opens). (more…)
(The very last section of this posting, on the name Monty Crisco, gets right down to man-on-man sex in street language, so is out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest; the rest of the posting is quirky but not indecent)
The 1/4 Zippy the Pinhead strip takes us back to Zippy’s imagined perverse version of the (now-defunct) Miss Albany Diner in Albany NY — call it the Zipperverse Diner — and its blackboard menu above the counter:
(#1) The messages on the board are about the day’s offerings, but neither sandwiches nor pies are mentioned; meanwhile, Monte Cristo sandwiches are a not-uncommon diner offering, but Zippy maintains, perversely, that the sandwich name is correctly spelled Monty Crisco (and you don’t want to think about the ingredients or how you eat the thing); and Nesselrode pie is a bit of elegance far from any ordinary diner’s pie offerings, but Zippy supposes, perversely, that it’s on the board at the comic-strip diner, with a typo in it
Three things here: about the (actual) diner and its appearance in an earlier Zippy strip, with the same drawing but different text in Zippy’s speech balloons; about (actual) Monte Cristo sandwiches and Nesselrode pie; and about the name Monty Crisco.
A 2022 strip from the webcomic dinos & comics, an exchange between two dinosaurs who, in other strips, profess their love for one another. (The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender these two dinosaurs; Blu is blue, Brn is reddish brown, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance.) Whatever their romantic status might be, they are certainly involved in a deep friendship with one another; in this strip, Brn reports one of the great satisfactions of deep friendship: in the company of your friend, you feel that you’re the best person you can be:
(#1) dinos & comics — on its website, described as “a comic about depressed dinosaurs who find hope in each other” — came to an end a little while back, and has been succeeded by a new series, dinosaur couch, in which the title makes clear the theme of therapy and counseling in the comics.
Still other themes: the search for human connection and for meaning in a meaningless world. All of this sounds earnest, and possibly helpful to your mental health, but it fails to capture the charm, wry insights, frequently self-mocking tone, and occasional downright silliness of these comics.
Meanwhile, the visual style is minimalist.
(Today has been difficult, so this is the best I can do in the way of posting — opening up a topic for further postings, soon to come.)
It starts with this memic shoeshi image I encountered today on Facebook, passed on through various friends and acquaintances, as these things are. A truly wonderful composition:
The memic shoeshi; shoeshi here is a punmanteau: a pun and a portmanteau
From the annals of cartoon understanding, today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro strip, which is incomprehensible if you don’t know a crucial piece of American popular culture (and Wayno’s title, “The Early Years”, won’t be much help to you):
(#1) Someday Seaman Apprentice Crunch will command his own ship, and then he’ll be Captain Crunch, familiarly known as Cap’n Crunch, and he’ll give that name to a sweet breakfast cereal that American kids have been enjoying for 60 years (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Note that Crunch is drinking from an 8-ounce milk carton (while his naval companion is having a beer).
That would be today, December 31st, New Year’s Eve. (The 12 days then go on to January 5th, Twelfth Night, Epiphany Eve.) Back on the 4th day, December 28th, my mail brought me a digital-art celebration of the 1st day. (For a change, not from the hands of digital artist Vadim Temkin, who’s off in Colombia, the gem of South America, being an absolutely adorable Santa Claus, but from another of my digital-artist friends.) For the occasion, a partridge of sorts in a pear tree of sorts, and — in the tradition of VT’s holiday compositions for me — starring a fabulously hot object of gay sexual desire.
(#1) For the record, what catches me in the bot boy (call him Primo, the first of the season): in order, his sweet smile, then his nicely furred torso, and then the crotch tease contrived by the artist
All three components — Primo; the plump beakbird; and the golden hanging fruits — have that air of hyper-reality that I find especially desirable in digital compositions; not trompe-l’oeil, but a kind of magic realism.
The pears aren’t actually metallically shiny, but they tend that way. The partridge is even odder: round and full, like the grey, or English, partridge, but with the eyes and beak of an auk, a parrot, a gull. For comparison:
(#2) The grey partridge, Perdix perdix, a plump gamebird in the pheasant family; note the beak (photo: Cornell eBird files)
Is the partridge in #1, perhaps, a New Zealand flightless partridge that has managed to perch precariously in the pear tree? Some sort of aukridge? (I have inquired of the artist, but they haven’t risen to the bait.)
(#3)
(#4)
My coinage (using the medical adjective internatal ‘between births’) for the period between the birth of Jesus (conventionally celebrated on December 25th) and the birth of the Gregorian-calendar New Year (January 1st). There’s no standard term in English for this period, though Twixmas (not recognized in any lexicography-based dictionary) has been used in some commercial settings, apparently to refer to a new shopping season; it seems to be commonly limited to December 27th – 30th (excluding Boxing Day).
Now, in the New Yorker‘s January 1 & 8, 2024, issue, cartoonist Emily Flake has contributed a graphic essay entitled “Tips for Filling the Dead Week Between Christmas and New Year’s”, in which she falls back on referring to this often aimless period as a dead week, a week out of ordinary life. Her suggestions largely embrace this deadness, in its various forms. Meanwhile, if you look at the media’s preoccupations this week, you’ll been inclined to think of it as the days of retrospection, since the media are much taken with reviews of the news events of the year that’s winding down, memorials to the notable people who died during the year, and catalogues of the Best of the Year in many categories (books, movies, tv shows, songs, whatever).
