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panel 1: Man at desk, poring over book with a look of grim determination. Other books are stacked and scattered on the desktop.

panel 2: With air of finality, man slams book shut with both hands. Relief and hard-won wisdom are etched on his face. He says “There! It’s done!”

panel 3: Man leans back in seat, talking over his shoulder to another student at another desk who glances up briefly from his own studies to hear ”I can now say ‘go fuck yourself’ in six different languages.”

panel 1: man and dog outside, man bending over to pet dog.

panel 2: man and dog standing there looking at each other.

panel 3: same as panel 2, but man says: “That being said, go shit in someone else’s yard.”

My letter-writing campaign to the various cartooning syndicates and independents urging more cartoons about visits to breweries has started to pay off:

“I have the energy of a bear that has the energy of two bears!”

“comic strip” cursing symbols - Google Search

I think this is the first comics cursing that I’ve ever seen to use “pi” in its symbology. Which is blog-worthy enough for me. But then I wondered if comics cursing symbols had a name, so I wouldn’t have to keep saying “comics cursing symbols.” I don’t think they do. Let me know if I’m wrong. But in the interest of brevity and the all-consuming desire to be first, I want to propose a name: “cursicals.” If that doesn’t work, perhaps “cursiphors.” Or, to introduce a little irony into the mix, “fucksicals.”

There, I’m first.

FoxTrot waltzes its way into early retirement | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

It hasn’t been all that good for at least a few years, but still. Also in the story: Boondocks is apparently “officially canceled” instead of on hiatus.

It’s definitely better than watching the slow lapse into repetition and listlessness that befalls most strips. Or the chilling be-vampiring that befalls the biggest cash cows: Peanuts is like the movie monster that just won’t die no matter how many stakes the heroine drives into its heart.

I thought that one of the reasons why I originally couldn’t find this strip was that I was remembering the caveman-speak wrong. Which is still probably true, but it’s interesting that “hom tink issa gul” (the incorrect spelling and the way I remember it) gets google hits, and “hom ink tissa gul” (the correct spelling) gets none.

Click to embiggen!

As you know, I have been trying to find an old several-panel comic strip about cavemen since the late eighties. Surely you knew that. In this strip, a caveman has caveman friends, a canine huppy dod companion, and gets pelted with rocks by a pretty rock trone gul. The strip was in an English Lit book from some forgotten freshman class from long ago that I was required to buy.

Googling “rock trone gul” doesn’t get one very far. It didn’t get me very far in the nineties, and it didn’t get me very far in this millenium either. Weird. But I’ve tried, fitfully, to google little snippets of caveman-speak every few months, knowing certainly that someone, somewhere, would type the appropriate caveman words into their blogs or whatnot, and my decades long quest would finally bear fruit. Rock trone gul. Huppy dod. Issa Ip. Hom tink issa hig. It would happen.

It was the holy grail of googling. Never any hits, but the strip was so good that I knew in my bones that eventually something would pop up. And it has.

“Ip Gissa Gul,” by George Booth. It was a combination of apt search phrases, apt cache searches, and apt Wayback lookbacks that cracked the nut. The catalyzing clue came from a spanish archive of the alt.motorcycles newsgroup. Somebody, for a message or two, used brief snippets of caveman-speak as his signature: “Whu Ip doon huppy dod?” “Hom tont ho.” “Hom tink issa gul!”

It was the break I was looking for. Mostly, it showed that I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. An hour later I was rummaging through The New Yorker archives looking for an image. I didn’t find it, but I did find confirmation of the strip’s existence, the strip’s Booth-ness, and the strip’s availability in a giant outrageously expensive compendium that I’ll wait several years before buying. Hell, I’ve waited this long.

I’m a goddamn genius. The only thing that could ruin it is if someone were to say to me “I knew that; why didn’t you just ask me?” because that would require me to curl up into a fetal ball for a week, maybe ten days.

from GYWO:

My cartoon-gland is just about played out, but I did want to comment on Darby Conley’s use of anatomically-correct symbols for the letters in the word “Hell.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a comic strip before. Tricky, but practically unnecessary for the word. Now, if somebody’d try their hand at “shit” or “fuck,” I will be impressed.

“Beetle, dig this hole.”
“£ü¢≠ you, Sarge.”

There’s a lot to say about this strip, but, in the end, I knew the Best Blondie Ever would have Daisy in it.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the comics. Burning and killing, too, but mostly talk. Last week it struck me that I hadn’t actually seen the Danish cartoons in question, and therefore didn’t really have an opinion about them. This weekend I finally got round to googling the source documents, in order to educate myself. I found one of the toons somewhere after a few minutes of looking.

I have to say one thing: the cartoon wasn’t funny. Or clever. It was Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Granted, it sounds funny when I type it out, but it wasn’t. I want to make that clear. It reminded me of editorial cartoons one might find in local newspapers by local artists who may think they know what’s clever or funny, but really haven’t a clue. The Sun Herald has an editorial cartoonist who fits that description, a guy named Lockley, who can’t do funny or clever to save his soul, but, bless him, keeps plugging away at it month after bitter month. I assume he’s a family man.

The cartoon was a failure in the only way it matters. And while I can understand people’s taking umbrage over the subject matter, those who take umbrage to the extent that they burn and kill are clearly sociopathic yahoos. Be that as it may. The fundamental questions that we should ask ourselves, given the last few troubling days, are these: What makes a cartoon funny? and How can unfunny cartoons be made funny?

Looking at the comics page in my local newspaper, I see a total of 23 strips. Out of that total, two are funny and need no improvement: Pooch Cafe and Arlo & Janis. Three are so completely unfunny, whether by design or not, that no amount of editing can possibly help: Rex Morgan, Crankshaft, and the abominable Funky Winkerbean. And of course, one is Classic Peanuts, the lurching zombie of the comics page, which fills me with horror to see it there still in the paper, moldy and stinking of death.

That leaves seventeen strips that, with a little help, could be made funny. Strips like Blondie, and Dilbert (You heard me! Scott Adams has been mailing it in for years now!), Shoe and the Family Circus. Ziggy. Even BC is not beyond help, if Johnny Hart were but to open up his shriveled soul to receive it.

And it wouldn’t take much to help! Just a word here and a word there. For example, this BC is devoid of humor:

whereas, through the magic of editing, it becomes this:

Hilarious.

Similarly, today’s Garfield

can, by massaging the dialogue slightly, be changed into this gem:

But what’s that, you say? Even though the dialogue’s improved, you’re still forced to see the artistically lazy image of Garfield not changing in the slightest way through three panels? Forced to bear the shitty arrogance and unbridled contempt for his audience displayed by Jim Davis, who spends more time drawing little circles over the i’s in his name than drawing the actual strip itself? Here, I fixed that, too, with a few deft touches of shading:

All it takes is a little effort.

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

This was weird. I checked Doonesbury a minute ago, and instead of Doonesbury, it was the current Boondocks strip. Everything about the page was Doonesbury, except the actual strip itself, which was Boondocks. I reloaded the page several times. The fourth reload (that’s right, I reloaded it four times—I couldn’t believe my eyes) the correct strip loaded in.

I have both strips bookmarked, so I’m assuming it was a Firefox thing. Never had that one before, though.

As I was reading the comics page in the newspaper this morning, it occurred to me that over half the comics on the page have been around at least as long as I’ve been around. Hi & Lois, Hagar the Horrible, Wizard of Id, Mark Trail, Funky Winkerbean, Dennis the Menace. Even, god help me, Peanuts, which is the seaweed-strewn immortal zombie of the comics page.

Because these strips have somehow tottered into my adulthood, I still see the same characters and names that I grew up with. And many of these names aren’t being regenerated in maternity wards. New mothers and fathers are naming their kids Joshua and Heather, not Dennis or Rex or Linus. Therefore, because these comic strips have the vampirish quality of continuing to exist despite everything, a time will come when the only place these names appear is on the comics page. Kids today, the Joshuas and the Heathers, will still be reading about the Dennises and the Heathcliffs when they are adults.

Which is really weird; it’ll be as if I had to read “Ezekiel the Menace” or “Hatshepsut and the Pirates” or “Nero Google & Marduk Smith.” Okay, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith is a bad example, but you get the point.

Santa Rosa, CA (AC)— The late Charles Schulz’s comic strip “Peanuts” has been placed on a two week online delay by United Feature Syndicate due to contractual obligations, said syndicate spokesman Tad Bowman.

“Even apart from the contractual reasons, it just makes sense to reward the newspaper reader with an up-to-date ‘Classic Peanuts,’” stated Bowman. “The newspaper reader has spent his or her fifty cents to buy this right. Online readers, in contrast, have been viewing these 5 to 54 year-old strips literally for free, in effect being subsidized by those who buy newspapers that run comic strips drawn by those who are long dead. No longer.”

“It’s about time,” stated Marigold Evans, subscriber to northern California’s Sacramento Bee. “I can’t tell you how annoying it is to bring up the latest classic antics of the Peanuts gang at the office, only to find out that others are reading the same strip for nothing on the internet. It’s a disgrace.”

“Delaying the online version of the strip seems very reasonable to me,” said Viki Monsanto of Chicago. “The net people want to have their cake and eat it, too, and that’s just not right.”

Added Franklin Gautier of Pass Christian, Mississippi, “When I’m talking about a funny joke I read in ‘Classic Peanuts,’ I want to know that the people I talk to paid to see it like me. Like, remember last week [when] Snoopy and Woodstock were dancing a happy dance, and then stopped to say ‘I hate cats,’ and then started dancing again? That was cool.”

Others interviewed, however, expressed different opinions. “Peanuts?” said Albert Haversham of North Brunswick, Iowa, “that’s the one with the dog and parrot and the round-bodied guy, right? Or am I thinking of ‘Ziggy?’”

“Classic Peanuts,” as the strip is now called five years after the death of creator Charles Schulz, appears in some 2,400 newspapers around the world. The Peanuts empire still accounts for $1.2 billion in annual sales worldwide, though most reasonable people are at a loss to explain why.

In certain circles, I just punched my one-way ticket to hell. All I can say is lighten up, man; I already acknowledged that I’d make a shitty Buddha.

I’ll be taking along some delicious candy cigarettes:

In my will I’ve requested that my body be buried with 4 cartons of candy Lucky Strikes and the spare keys to somebody’s Lincoln Continental. I don’t want to be caught short in the afterlife.