Two more cartoons that came in this morning, entertained me, but presented some question as to whether I should in fact post them. They were both of a sort that I have posted about before: a Zippy with remarkable proper names, combining brand names, food names, names of real but obscure people, and/or words that merely entertain Bill Griffith (who is given to word enthusiasms); and a (Bizarro) cartoon noting (and illustrating) the fact that (most) characters in the comics don’t age over the years that tick past in the outside, non-comics world.
These are entirely suitable items for posting on this blog. The problem is that I’ve posted about these two topics again and again. so that it’s not clear to me that a new item of either type is worth posting, unless it presents some remarkable feature.
There’s a parallel in my postings about certain kinds of widespread linguistic phenomena: verbings, nounings, back-formations, portmanteaus, ambiguities, for example. Every so often I post to say that I do not propose to catalogue every instance of these phenomena — that would be an impossible task — so I ask people to send me only cases that seem in some way especially interesting.
Maybe it’s time to do the same for some comics-oriented topics. I’m not sure. In any case, here are the two I’ve been puzzling about.
