… provided by friends in a time of unspeakable violence, though neither is a totally unmixed pleasure: from Mike McKinley, the 1962 boys’ space adventure yarn Lost City of Uranus, just for the cheap but evergreen double entendre in its title; from Betsy Herrington, a link to the rainbow dreadhead stone lions of Monza, Italy, an admirable exercise in yarn bombing.
Archive for the ‘Narrative’ Category
Two diversions
August 4, 2019Oh that’s good
July 22, 2019Following on my 7/7 posting “GN/BN”, about the Good News Bad News joke routine, which the hounds of ADS-L traced back to the early 19th century (at least). Other commenters offered formuations of the idea that there’s a good side and a bad side to everything, the bad comes withthe good, and lots of other things that, however interesting, are not instances of the joke formula (in any of its variants). But then on 7/16, Bill Mullins posted about an entirely different joke formula hinging on the opposition of good and bad.
Bill wrote:
Are you familiar with Archie Campbell’s “That’s Good/That’s Bad” routines? He used to do them on Hee Haw.
And we’re off!
Lilo & Stitch
March 23, 2019Today’s morning name. I really have no idea why. I haven’t even seen the movie and was only vaguely aware of its theme. Maybe the sound-symbolic values of the names, the contrast between the /l/s of Lilo, voiced liquids, symbolically flowing; and the /s t č/ of Stitch, all voiceless obstruents, symbolically spiky and aggressive. And the /aj/ of Lilo, long and with a low nuclear F2; versus the /ɪ/ of Stitch, quite short and with a very high F2. Lilo is female, human, and family-oriented; Stitch is male, alien, and destructive.
The musician, the mayor, his instrument, and their vermin
June 24, 2018The Bizarro/Wayno collaboration on the 21st is another exercise in cartoon understanding (but a relatively easy one):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
You need to know the basic outline of a European legend (the major clues to which are the reference to ridding a town of rats and the unusual word pied in the title), and you need to know something about musical instruments (to recognize that the sousaphone — named in the title — plays the role of the (musical) pipe in the legend).
Then there’s more to be said about the parallels between the cartoon world and the legend world, with special reference to wind instruments (of which the sousaphone is the largest). Which leads me to the rich world of the legend and its connection to the real world. And the fictivity of stories; there’s a fair amount of factuality, or at least real-world context, in the legend. And from there — surprise! — to St. John and Paul’s Day next week (June 26th). And from there — another surprise! — to eunuchs and the social world of the Roman Empire.
Narrative theory at the therapist’s
June 1, 2018Today’s Rhymes With Orange, a fresh take on the Psychiatrist cartoon meme:
You don’t get a lot of narrative theory in cartoons, but here’s some basic stuff from Wikipedia:
The art class
May 23, 2018Edward Steed cartoon in the May 21st New Yorker:
It’s about point of view (pov), especially as this reflects selective attention, an inclination to focus on certain things in the context over others.
Fenwick the semi-generic
May 14, 2018Just posted on this blog, this Zippy:
(#1)
Zippy-God as the psychiatrist, a very Zippy-like generic Pinhead as the patient; he’s given the name Fenwick in the third panel. The artist is fond of Fenwick.
The pizza boy as cultural figure
October 12, 2017(Mostly cultural analysis, focused on gay porn. But plenty of very plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
(#1)
The pizza boy archetype, as depicted by young Melbourne artist Allain de Leon in DNA Magazine, April 2013
The figure is a package of symbolic content and associations, among them: the desirable youth; the delivery figure, someone who comes to your door bearing pleasurable goods for money; pizza as an American cultural emblem of warm informal social associations; and a cluster of associations of food with sex, some more general, others specific to pizza slices and whole pizza pies
The trigger for this posting is a recent ad for C1R/Catalina Video, with a sale on a new release — Pizza Boy 4 – Slice of Pie — and the three earlier films in the series, starting with Pizza Boy: He Delivers (William Higgins, 1986). The ads, which are way XXX-rated, are available in a posting on AZBlogX (“Another slice of pizza boy”). But here: a salacious image of pizza boy Steve Henson from the first film, a classic of gay porn:
Story Structure
April 8, 2014
63N: narrative structure
March 16, 2014Somewhat out of order, a section of the Stanford linguistics course 63N (on linguistics in the comics) on narrative structure (partly so I can introduce two strips that I wouldn’t have posted here before).
