Derivations

As I almost finish catching up, I come to what I hope will be my most frequent topic, crossovers. What I love about these things is that there's such a wide variety of methods and styles. One of the most noteworthy was a massive multiple crossover last year. From Wikipedia:

In 2005, Blondie celebrated its 75th anniversary with a three-month-long story line, featuring various surprises including cameo appearances of characters from other comic strips such as B.C., Beetle Bailey, The Family Circus, For Better or For Worse, Garfield, Hägar the Horrible, Shoe and The Wizard of Id, among others. In addition, Blondie and/or Dagwood were featured in Dennis the Menace, Hi and Lois, B.C., Family Circus, Baby Blues, Hägar the Horrible, and Curtis.

Of course, while that was a very fun story arc, it was completely authorized and pre-planned. What I'll be noting more often in this blog is when an artist does an unauthorized crossover, often as tribute, mockery, or the grey area in between, satire. A few weeks ago FoxTrot made a fairly light-hearted jab at one of my least favourite titles, Family Circus.



I think Bill Amend intentionally avoided naming the character, so that it could be left as a generic Family Circus-styled entity. It makes the joke a little more subtle, and reduces the possibility of getting sued.

The very next day, Sally Forth made an even more subtle external nod.



This was especially noteworthy since someone who has never read For Better or For Worse (where 4evah and Eva are from) would still understand the strip. Rather than a reference or parody being the punchline, it's a subtle tribute.

And finally, yesterday's FoxTrot gets A for effort, but a great big "meh" for the joke itself:



The humour of this strip should come from the bizarre crossover, but instead it just combines the Jason-hates-his-sister joke with Cathy's body-image-problems joke.