Mystery solved?

I've always felt that the passive "achoo" was an inadequate onomatopoeia for something as forceful as a sneeze. Today's 9 Chickweed Lane offers an alternative.


I'm not sure who needs to be consulted on changing these things, but I just hope our campaign isn't held back by some political correctness opposition who feels it bears too much of a resemblance to "Auschwitz".

Also, today's Pickles offers a possible answer to my question about Monday's Lio.

oh my

First off, an observation regarding today's Lio.


The gag is a fairly standard Lio gag (and I mean that in a good way, of course), but why is the TV propped up on its side? If it was related to the gag, I would understand, but as it is, it's just plain weird. Then again, "just plain weird" is standard fare in Lio, so the real answer could very well be "just because".

Now, some time ago, Matt did this thing where he isolated a panel from a strip to show how odd some panels might seem without the necessary context. I don't think "odd" is quite the word to describe the result of taking a panel out of context from today's Pickles.


Um... yeah, I'll just let you mull that one over for awhile.

edit: When I first typed up this entry and did a "preview" everything looked like it was supposed to, but then after I published it I discovered that some layouts played havoc with the properly accented title of the strip "Lio", since it's not standard ASCII, so I replaced it with a plain "o". In doing this edit, I tried to link to the Wikipedia article, but Blogger's interface replaced the accented "o" with a question mark in the link, so all I can suggest is to go to the article of the obscure Belgian pop star, and click the relevant link near the top of the page.

Weekend report.

I don't know if this is new, but I just noticed it. Check out The Born Loser from Friday and Saturday:



When the POV is really close to his face, the lines are thicker. There's a handful of possible explanations for this, but I'm pretty sure it's one of two things. Either Chip Dunham Sansom^* drew every panel from a "normal" wide shot POV, and then zoomed in on the face (which could mean that he's not capable of drawing a close-up properly), or he used a thicker pen when inking the close-ups, because he figured that it made some sort of sense regarding the perspective. Well, people don't have lines drawn around their features in real life, so if you "zoom" in on something, there are no lines to get thicker. In every other comic strip that I looked at for both of those days, the line thickness was a constant, regardless of POV. I know it's a stupid thing for me to obsess about, but now I really want to know what the heck is going on here.

Anyway, on to other things, like Saturday's Between Friends:


Her last name is Crow. It always bugs the heck out of me when people screw up celebrities' names. The names are heard on TV and radio and seen in print so much, you'd think it wouldn't be that difficult to get right. I can remember back when people kept pronouncing Cyndi Lauper's name wrong, and to this day people still want to spell "Weird Al" Yankovic's last name with an 'h' at the end.

Two post-scripts for this one, by the way. First, today's strip continues the reference to Crow's "got milk" ad, and this time they got the name right. They even said it twice, possibly to make sure we noticed. Second, I saw the ad, and it's nothing special. I'm not saying it's bad, and she is a nice-looking lady, but I didn't see anything spectacular about the ad.

And one final note, from today's Frank & Ernest Mother Goose and Grimm^*... remember, folks, there was a time when adjusting your clocks due to the DST changes wasn't as simple as it is today.



^* - Thanks to Charles Brubaker for catching my mistakes... Chip is a weird enough name, having two completely different cartoonists share the name is mildly annoying. Also, Frank & Ernest and Mother Goose & Grimm are similar in that they both often have strips that don't involve any of their central characters, but the styles are very distinct, and it was a little foolish of me to get them mixed up.

COFFEE!!!!!

Yesterday's Lio was another awesome "external reference":


An excellent addition to my growing collection of various Family Circus "burns".


If you enjoy coffee-related humour, you should check out this week's Dilbert (but start on Wednesday if you want to skip the drudgery that led to the coffee story arc). Even yesterday's Garfield provides a caffinated chuckle (and any genuine chuckle from Garfield is a rarity, so relish it while you can).

Hump Day miscellany

Obviously, low-brow humour is not a rarity in the funny pages, but it is delightful now and then to get a strip like this. Unabashedly silly, but genuinely funny.


The king's a little guy, you say? Is this perhaps a prelude to a Wizard of Id crossover?