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?

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!!!

Okay, this sequence of frames from the Sunday Garfield comic is intended to clearly show that the Fat Cat is mirroring Jon’s actions…

…but still, that last panel looks like he’s KISSING JON’S ASS.

When the creator of The New Adventures of Queen Victoria staged a “name the offensive teddy bear” contest, well, you knew who had to be front and center…

Of course, that wasn’t my only suggestion:

Bear Genitalia

Ho-Ho the Nappy Headed Bear (it was a good year for Imus-related offensiveness)

(for anti-fans of Tickle Me Elmo) Waterboard Me Allah

Melt-The-Arctic-And-Kill-All-The-Polar-Bears-So-I-Can-Move-North Brown Bear

The Saw 4 Official Movie Bear with Detachable Limbs and Blood

and Wondermark, The Clip-Art Comic Much Funnier than Queen Victoria Bear (which I included just to offend Pab Sungenis personally to which he replied “Actually, that’s not that unreasonable a statement. I happen to think Wondermark is very funny.” Some people are just no fun to bait. Coincidentally, so are some bears.)

Well, I was wrong. No reboot. in fact, months after everything blows up real good, webcomic character Jon Rosenberg is locked in his office, Fish is even more despondent than usual, no sign of Phillip or anyone else emerging from a Portal in the men’s room, and we are introduced to the first new characters of the new storyline, two Xibalba Consulting employees, one an Ancient Aztec (don’t know if he’s a programmer) and the other apparently somebody they hired away from Monsters Inc. Which raises the possibility for another interesting crossover, since Evil Inc. has just lost an employee, the previously unheralded Dr. Dratt to a “more attractive offer”. Hey, where else could he be going? News Corp? (Dang it, I think Friday’s strip already gave it away…) Well, I didn’t know if a Dumbrella comic and a Half-Pixel comic could work together anyway; but webcomic creator Jon Rosenberg must know Scott Kurtz if webcomic character Jon Rosenberg “survives on a diet of caffeinated panda blood“. Anyway, I’m not going to say another word about Goats.

Except that the megaGAMERZ 3l33t New Years Resolutions comic was probably the funniest thing about resolutions that I’ve seen in the funnies, web or paper, this year. Which is not saying much. Because there have been so many newspaper comics doing variations on the same three or four jokes about New Years Resolutions. And they are all so painfully lame that I was considering doing a post summarizing them, but realized I could not do it without becoming The Comics Curmudgeon. And I simply can’t afford the surgery.

One topic that the funnies are handling even more badly than New Year’s Resolutions is the Writer’s Strike. Get Fuzzy started out with a solid bit of inside jokery…

…but went downhill immediately.

And the introduction of Bucky’s “editor” was a non-stop-ticket to obviousville…
and

Kevin and Kell took its usual l-o-n-g s-t-r-e-t-c-h to come up with an animal-society version of a human-society situation, but delivered some chuckles: “Subsidiary usage = leftovers”, “how long it’s been since the last contract”, and what happens when the animal negotiators lock themselves in to work out a resolution? Yes, that one’s obvious.

Questionable Content truly lives up to it name, as Marten gets way too much pertinent data about his girlfriend’s father, his girlfriend and his mother. I have never laughed harder at the words “PLEASE don’t finish that sentence.” But he still has the semblance of mind to give as good as he gets. I have never laughed harder at the words “washing your hands.”

After all that, this quote from Count Your Sheep sounds absolutely filthy: “Some parts are meant to stay that way.”

Also from the department of fun with words: “Flipping Off In Progress”… “The first step to recovery is to admit you have a… (…thing…)” “Sounds like a medical problem.” “Fear of Change.” “Random Slides.” “…Since Somebody Reset This Sign.” “The professionals have left the building.” “Suddenly, I’m afraid to turn around.” “Telling me to calm down won’t calm me down!”

Scary-Go-Round’s Ryan Beckwith must be a member of the WGA, because he has grown a far better Strike Beard than Dave, Conan or me.

More proof that I am an idiot. When Starslip Crisis made a quick scene change to Ganymede Zoological Station, I actually wondered “what is Kris going to do there?” The obvious answer: JINXLETS! If this were a TV series, I’d have seen the marketing tie-in a mile away.

The Order of the Stick once again takes the concept of the “infinite canvas” to a most painful extreme. And this is one of those times with the strip that I wish I knew something - anything - about RPGs, but even in my ignorance, am enjoying the show.

Semi-private Note to Danielle Corsetto: ConfidentPussyClub.com (as well as .net and .org) IS still available. For the moment.

Finally (for the moment), the new penguin-centric comic (as if we needed another one) Arctic Circle shows how even cartoonists can get “blog envy”…

Every once in a very long while, the generally silly military comic Beetle Bailey dips its little toe into the pool of reality. And when it does, as seen here and here (before I even started this comics-centered blog), the effect is deeply, deeply weird. But never more so than today…

Thanks for the link, Jon. You singlehandedly jumpstarted the traffic to this little blog and forced me to add “update Funny Paperless regularly” to my list of New Year Resolutions.

So, based on the evidence so far, what are the chances that, a few minutes after Jay Leno stumbles his way through his first writerless “Tonight Show”, the next “Goats” comic starts with a panel that looks like this…

Of course, there would be some good things about a ‘total reboot’, like the return to the original coloring of Jon, Phillip, Toothgnip and Alien Bob, and removing Oliver from the Body of Khan (which I always considered a very bad fashion statement). But, still, it would be nice if some of the characters introduced in the last two years could have a continued life in a new Manhattan (would it be “4″ now?). And not just Brock Stalkley, although I do own his t-shirt, but when you have talking chicken, goats and goldfish, why can’t a talking broccoli open up an independent coffee shop between two Starbucks locations? And Farmella… she could provide a decidedly non-New York POV and she and Phillip could double-date with Jon and Megan. Then there are the biker/bodyguards Carl and Roger, who could sit at the opposite end of the bar at the Pecuiler as a funhouse-mirror-image Jon and Phillip. And One Death… yeah, he’ll be back. But please lose Fish’s alter ego Fineas, Woody Allen, the monkeys, Alfred the bartender (he’s nice, but he’d never make it working at the Peculier), the Pangean Liberation Army and the Corndogs.

Still, after the multiverse-rending events of recent times, you have to wonder what Mr. Rosenberg could possibly do for an encore. Maybe a 2008 Presidential Campaign theme? No, with the Electoral College the way it is, having anybody campaigning in New York is too far-fetched, even for Goats. A crossover with Octopus Pie? Eve Ning meeting Toothgnip would only result in total destruction and another reboot. Maybe something involving Facebook or Google, or a time-travel arc which starts with the guys meeting a nerdy japanese fellow… yeah, I know, totally unoriginal. That’s why I’m not doing a webcomic myself. You know what they say in the 2.0 world. “Those who can’t do, blog.”

Starting off with an odd synchronicity between two of the more random newspaper comics, because Bizarro and Frank and Ernest rarely approach an idea from the same direction…

Not content with being questionable, J. Jacques’ webcomic had to be audience-participatory for this Christmas…

Since it is the policy of this blog to leap at any halfway-appealing bait: