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Daddy Daze, 8/11/21

I think we’re all well aware that the actual cat poster caption is “Hang In There, Baby,” which led to me read this strip and immediately wonder “Hmm, is the actual ‘Hang In There, Baby’ poster copyrighted, and is the copyright holder extremely litigious?” This in turn led me to the Wikipedia article about the poster, which was a whole journey, informing me that:

• The photographer was Victor Baldwin, who had previous been best known for taking pics of Rat Pack celebs
• The original version was this, a photo I was totally unfamiliar with



• It was immediately ripped off and knockoff versions with different pictures proliferated, which explains why I was unfamiliar with the original
• Baldwin sued the makers of all the knockoffs he could find, just on principle, almost never asking for more than his own court costs being covered, which I guess answered my original question
• The first person to buy the poster was Meredith Wilson, composer of The Music Man
• People sent copies of the poster to Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon during their respective scandals in the ’70s, urging them to hang on to office (it didn’t work)
• “Victor Baldwin made approximately $700,000 from sales of the posters, much of which went to settle his divorce, which he was apparently happy to spend it on”
• Based on their respective “See also” sections, Wikipedia apparently considers “Hang In There, Baby”‘s U.K. equivalent to be a a poster featuring a tennis player’s naked ass, based only on the fact that they were both wildly popular posters in the 1970s

Anyway! Comics can be truly educational, in the sense that they frequently irritate me into learning things despite myself.

Mary Worth, 8/11/21

Mary is starting to go through her highly regimented Meddle Protocol! Stage 1: Determine if the subject is capable of recognizing basic behavioral patterns!

Marvin, 8/11/21

JUNE 2021: Hmm, all the characters in Marvin are getting a little stale. Mostly they just are angry at Marvin all time time, and obviously you can’t blame them, but it gets old. What if we introduce a new — and topical — one: an Alex home assistant?

AUGUST 2021: We regret to inform you that the Alexa home assistant now mostly just gets angry at Marvin all the time.

Family Circus, 8/11/21

A fun fact about the Grand Canyon is that Colorado City, which is in the small sliver of Arizona north of the Grand Canyon, was for a long time a hotbed of rebel Mormon polygamists precisely because the state line protected them from Utah authorities and the Grand Canyon protected them from Arizona authorities, just putting that out there Billy

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Gil Thorp, 8/10/21

I’ve been making lots of jokes about not being able to understand any of the golf lingo in Gil Thorp, but guess what: I’ve been carefully analyzing these strips, trying to squeeze as much meaning out of them as my feeble non-golfing brain can understand, and with today’s strip I have cracked the code: Hendricks is a golf scammer! Specifically, he’s much better at golf than his handicap would indicate, hitting some great shots and then deliberately hitting terrible ones to lull everyone into a false sense of complacency (and keeping his handicap artificially high, or possibly low, however it works in golf). Anyway, I feel a little embarrassed to be as excited as I am about figuring this out, but at least I’m not excited about figuring out how much a golf ball costs after crawling around some field to find it.

Mary Worth, 8/10/21

Remember the time Mary, Jeff’s ostensible girlfriend, picked up a dude at his own mother’s funeral and he never noticed? Remember the time she spent an erotically charged week in New York with a handsome Broadway actor and he never noticed? Drew’s take on his dad’s romantic ineptitude checks out, is what I’m saying. At least he’ll get over it fast when Mary finally does finally leave him, right? (No, absolutely not, he will whine about it endlessly.)

Curtis, 8/10/21

All social media platforms, Tomaura? Even LinkedIn? I don’t think a video of Curtis getting mauled by a polar bear is going to do very good numbers on LinkedIn.

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Crankshaft, 8/9/21

You know, after many years in the comics-mocking biz, you get somewhat inured to the foibles of the daily strips. That’s why it’s good to get a fresh perspective sometimes, like when my wife saw this Crankshaft over my shoulder and said, in tones of increasing incredulity, “Wait, is that the joke? There’s no more to it? Like, there’s not another panel? He just said the wrong word? That’s the joke?” Yes! That is, in fact, the joke. But the thing that makes this a character-driven comic strip is how angry he looks while he says it, for no good reason. That’s our Crankshaft! He’s old, dumb, and mean!

Funky Winkerbean, 8/9/21

At least Crankshaft has a joke, though! Funky Winkerbean is a more story-driven strip, but it really is supposed to have punchlines. Maybe … something from Mason about “unwrapping” some surprise? Never thought I’d be over here demanding a smirk-accompanied sub-pun from Funky Winkerbean, but now I realize that’s the base level of effort I expect from the Funkyverse strips.

Mary Worth, 8/9/21

Mary Worth, of course, doesn’t need anything so vulgar as a “joke” or a “punchline” to be the most hilarious comic strip in the paper. Not sure what’s funnier: that Drew feels compelled to compliment Mary’s cooking even though he wasn’t able to tell exactly what kind of spherical starch blobs accompanied the lamb (“probably they’re … root vegetables? of some kind?”) or that Dr. Jeff is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice — using his highly trained surgeon’s hands to wash the dishes like he’s the help — just to make sure his son gets meddled properly.