I don't like Mondays

Bob Thaves, creator of Frank and Ernest, passed away two weeks ago, and I just heard about it today. Frank and Ernest was never one of my favourite strips, so I won't go into a eulogy or anything, but today's Candorville is a really cool tribute.


Also, as a follow-up to yesterday's piece about Pearls Before Swine referencing Family Circus, today's strip basically recycles the same joke. It's easy to complain about comic strip artsts being lazy and redundant, but Pastis has a good excuse for this, and anyone who's read the Calvin & Hobbes 10th Anniversary book knows all about it. Some newspapers will carry certain titles only through the week but not on Sunday, and some will carry certain titles only on Sunday but not through the week. As a result, artists have to make sure that the Sunday strip can stand on its own, and that if it's incorporated into a story happening in the dailies, that it's not essential to that story. In other words, there's never a guarantee that someone reading today's PBS in the paper saw yesterday's (for example, the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail, which started carrying PBS a few months ago, doesn't have a Sunday edition and doesn't include the Sunday strips in their weekend edition like some papers do).

So, there is a legitimate excuse, but the end result is that today's strip completely falls flat for anyone who saw yesterday's, which basically carried the entire weight of this joke. I predict/hope that reading strips online will eventually become popular enough that artists will begin to obey this Sunday-standalone rule less and less, thus preventing irritating things like this.