The Epiphany Rhymes With Orange is an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1)
Without the title and the comment balloon (on the left), the cartoon is still compensible, and funny — this material adds some extra humorous depth — but none of it works at all unless you know the song.
Circulating on Facebook (and many other sites) recently, this penguinocalypse cartoon:
(#1)
I call this a cartoon because it’s a marriage of a quite specific text with a quite specific image, circulated as humor. In fact, I haven’t been able to find this text without this image, or this image without this text (right down to the illegible credit in the lower right-hand corner). Nor have I found any variants of this text, or any variants of this image. #1 is a unique artistic creation, just like the other cartoons I post about here — of the subtype in which the image is taken from some other source (in this case, it’s a photoshopped carnivore penguin) rather than drawn by the creator. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover who the creator was.
Liana Finck in the January 6th New Yorker, with a seasonal evolution cartoon:
(#1) Going back: devolution + home for the holidays
The most recent posting on this topic: on 3/5/19, “Another 100k spams”, where I noted that the number of spam comments here (since the blog started in December 2008) passed 5,600,000 on 3/3. Some were automatically deleted by WordPress software, a great many more were made available for bulk deletion (or individual inspection) by me, and some were submitted to me individually for moderation. In periodic spam attacks, comments spam arrives at the rate of more than one per second (until the software wrestles it to the ground again).
That was 3/3. On 7/23, the count passed 5,700,000. And then, yesterday (12/30), 5,800,000. 6 million beckons! (Probably not next year, but soon.)
Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet cartoon for this season:
(#1) The pleasures of the Christmas season, followed by resolutions for the New Year
Two bulletins in the portmanteau news: portmanteau holiday names for combinations of holidays (especially in the December holiday season); portmanteau restaurant names for types of restaurants with something extra added. For example: the holimanteau Chrismukkah, the restaumanteau breastaurant.
On the first day of Christmas, in a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, Jesus seeks therapy for a life that has gotten out of his control. On the second day of Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day, Daily Jocks enlists a hugely overstuffed musclehunk to memorialize St. Stephen of the Sacred Box.
(Note: a certain amount of male flesh, crude wordplay on package and box, and lots of sacrilege. Use your judgment.)
The Zippy from the 21st takes us into a world where hidden identities surround us everywhere:
(#1) Griffy gives the definition, and he and Zippy supply examples — in particular Karl Malden’s nose
Notes on pareidolia, on Karl Malden’s nose, and the Kinks’ “Destroyer”.
By William Haefeli in the 12/2/19 New Yorker, this entry in his chronicles of fashionable urban upper middle class gay men, especially in couples, especially in New York City:
(#1) “Someday I’ll buy a little place in the country and take my finger off the Zeitgeist.”
Meanwhile, both men are on the cutting edge of the Zeitgeist in fashion for men. Black guy with dreads and a neck tattoo on the left, white guy with a short ponytail and an ornate curly beard on the right. (I won’t even go into the clothes and accessories.)
With a bit of adjustment, or just relabeling, almost anything can be made relevant to the Christmas season. For music, you can just throw in some seasonal reference, or — as in today’s Zits — a refrain of solfege syllables common in traditional English music, famously in the fa la la of the Christmas carol “Deck the Halls”:
(#1) Deck the rats with love of spleen
