Sorry for the long period of silence; I was promising myself to FIRST re-do the backend of this blog before I started posting again, but that’s not gonna happen for a while. I was particularly shamed when John ‘interrobang’ Ralston made a comment that got stuck in the moderation cue with the spammy bits, especially since, I have a half-finished post about his wonderful recently-concluded (but less recent every day) A Year in Comics project.

But I just discovered something potentially scandalous involving a major newspaper comic… One of my compadres at MetaChat brought to my attention an excellent new “random-style” webcomic called Truck Bearing Kibble. I laughed. I did not cry. I wished I could draw one-tenth as well. I perused the archive and when I got to November 8th (three months ago) I saw this…

(Usually if a comic has a long-term archive, I just link to it rather than copy it, but this time I need to show the visual evidence)
Okay, nice gag, but I knew I had seen it before and very recently. Sure enough, Mother Goose and Grimm for February 5th (three days ago) (and syndicated by the web-unfriendly King Features) had this…

Okay, the hinge is at a different place in the Easter Island head (I liked Truck Bearing Kibble’s location better), but otherwise, it’s the same gag. Now, Grimmy was published three months later, which is plenty of time, even with the newspaper syndicate lead times, for Mike Peters to have seen or heard of the gag before he used it. Maybe he bought the joke from a less-than-scrupulous gag-writer, or had it suggested to him by someone who didn’t make clear it was a cartoon that was up on the web. Whatever, I believe an injustice has been done to Jeremy Kramer & Eric Vaughn (unless it turns out Kramer & Vaughn sold him the joke).

Grimmy is eating the Kibble!!!

Remember how much we all enjoyed pointing and laughing at the newspaper comics making “Snakes on a Plane” jokes weeks after the movie bombed? Well, it looks like the resolution of the Writers’ Strike is providing another opportunity to make fun of those long syndication lead times…


I mean, how often do you get to see BC and Rudy Park make the same mistake?

This one not only was published a day after the writers returned to work, but it also just seemed odd for “9 to 5″, a comic with a business theme (in fact, it’s the first one featuring a church I recall that strip ever doing)…

While “Strange Brew” can’t help doing a gag that maybe betrays a little jealousy of TV sitcom writers by a lowly cartoonist…

And “Rudy Park” is almost as irrelevant as Rudy Giulianni (I have been waiting to make that comment…)

Interesting… Not only did BC outlive it’s creator, but it’s celebrating it’s 50th birthday…

They say Johnny Hart was a hardcore creationist, but his successor doing the strip seems to understand evolution…

As part of my efforts to update this blog a lot more frequently, I hereby pledge to spotlight all references to “blogs” in comics, newspaper or web… and what better time to start than a day when “blog” is the last word in two strips as different as Boy on a Stick and Slither…

…and Mutts…
.

And, just for good measure, here are Frank & Ernest from just a few days ago, in their own pun-derful way…

I knew that sooner or later, the backlash to xkcd would begin, but I never expected it would start over…. citrus fruit.

But then, I never suspected Randall Munroe to be a fruitfucker… (Webcomics’ Original Fruit Fucker here)

R. Stevens, that old Diesel Sweetie, is the first to respond….

Then, a Redditor adds another dimension (or two) to the controversy… (He says… “Um… the grapefruit drew it. I just uploaded it for him.” and “Please also keep in mind that the grapefruit has an axe to grind.”) And in the ensuing argument on Reddit, another view arises.

Best comment: “I love how the most controversial webcomic ever posted on reddit was a ranking of fruit.”

More to come… (let’s face it, even I can make an X/Y chart)

UPDATE: A very well-interfaced polling device has been put online for your fruit opinions…Vote for the fruit of your choice… but vote!