If you have more than a passing interest in comics, you know about the often absurdly long lead times between creation and publication. So it really comes as no surprise that “The Quigmans” featured a “Snake on a Plane” gag on Labor Day.

(if you can’t read the second line of the caption, it’s “I ordered kosher rodent.”)

Now, that’s not nearly as awkward as the plane crash scene in the opening to the Emmy Awards show after the all-news networks had spent all day reporting a fatal plane crash, but, the Snakes movie premiered 17 days ago, earned the adjective “disappointing” 15 days ago, disappeared from the pop culture radar 6 days ago, and just last Friday, the last website finished scrubbing all mention of the movie from its archives (”No, we weren’t the ones who got caught up in all that nonsense… you must be thinking of some other blog”). Of more immediate concern for me was the fact that soon after I first saw that comic, the one of the mousetraps I had put in various locations here at One Foop Manor caught the mouse who had been eating my instant oatmeal. And that rodent did not look kosher.

What’s really awkward is Irregular Webcomic, the photocomic featuring genuine LEGO® thingies, ran a pre-scheduled gag today featuring LEGO® Steve the Croc Wrangler in which he survived but the Croc died. Of course, everone has heard what happened to the real life model for LEGO® Steve. Sad, tragic, bitterly ironic and totally not funny. And David Morgan-Mar, the mind behind the Irregular, is saddened, but being one of the few true Iron Men in updating his comic regularly, chose not to let anybody’s death interrupt his schedule. He is apparently determined that LEGO® Steve will live on (and he still has more comics with that character in the buffer). I don’t know if I agree with that, but he did toss in a topical bonus strip featuring LEGO^® Death:

Of course, Fleen, the tabloid rag of webcomics, tried to conflate the issue by pointing out that the delightfully snarky Questionable Content had also done something “vaguely crocodile themed”. Sorry, Fleensters, but Pintsize the AnthroPC referred to “wrestling alligators” while leading up to a joke about wrestling college chicks, and if you can’t tell an alligator from a crocodile, or for that matter a college chick from a crocodile, maybe you guys should be reviewing a less visual medium.

Did you know that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have joined Spiderman, James Bond, The Pink Panther, Winnie the Pooh and countless past failed crossovers on the newspaper comics page? Well, maybe not your local newspaper, if you still have a local newspaper. But I digress. Yes, the Turtles are in the Funnies. And they’re trying to be funny.

I remember the original comic books having kind of a sly sense of humor, but not like this.