A few funnies from Friday

This is a rare instance where the ability to easily color comics all the time–both online and in print, as in the example of this scan from the Cleveland Plain Dealer–can actually actively ruin a comic.In black and white, this would have been kind of clever, as a drawing of a barren desert wasteland and a drawing of a barren snowy wasteland would look identical, and the reader would have to depend on context clues to tell which of the two was actually in the drawing. Whitehead's gag, however, is to include two, conflicting sets of context clues, demanding a neat little clash.

However, the sand or snow the characters are traveling across is colored to resemble sand, so that the fellow on the right looks out of place, deflating the tension of the "Is it a desert or a snowscape?" question the drawing would otherwise beg.

It's not often you see a clever comic thoroughly unraveled by the coloring like this, and I spent far longer pondering the effect of the coloring on Whitehead's original intention than I did enjoying the moment the cartoon otherwise would have offered.


Hey, the first kid is three heroes in one, while the second kid is only two heroes in one. Are the character's they're playing in conflict, or teamed up? Because the first kid would win in a fight; he's got Superman's powers, Batman's brains and gadgets and Aquaman's...je ne sais quoi. The other kid is just Spider-Man mixed with a plastic toy.

(Does "Bat-Aqua-Super-Man" sound awkward? I would think you'd start with Super, and end up with "Super-Bat-Aqua-Man," or perhaps "Super-Aqua-Bat-Man," but the latter reminds me of the band, and thus suggests a far different superhero).


This is a weird one. It seems like a decade or two ago papers wouldn't have run it because it had the word "gay" in it, and nervous editors would be worried about acknowledging the existence of gays in the notoriously conservative newspaper comics pages, and now it seems like maybe they shouldn't have run it so as not to offend any of their many gay readers.

Also, I can't take my eyes off the lit stick of dynamite on the teacher's desk. This strip is basically insane.


That is the worst drawing of a sheep I have ever seen in my entire life. It looks a little like a drawing of a sheep by someone who has never actually seen a picture of a sheep, but heard someone describe one once. If I didn't read the dialogue, I would have assumed that was a baby polar bear.