These are perhaps semi-CIDUs. So do two semi-CIDUs make one CIDU?
Usual John sends in this puzzler: who is he hiding from, and why? Hiding the purchase from his wife? Hiding so he can avoid tipping?
Dirk the Daring sent in this Foxtrot. May 5th is World Cartoonist Day, but even cartoonists seem to have ignored it, judging by my feed. I guess it’s hard to compete with tacos and margaritas.
This is actually a long-running plot thread in Safe Havens: The boy called here “Leo” is also, in his other time and place, going to be Leonardo da Vinci. His education in science and technology as a youth in the modern world will underlie his great talents in the 15th and 16th Centuries.
Does anyone else here look at that and think, “Oh yeah, I remember that speculation coming up in The Door Into Summer!“? That 1956/7 novel by R.A. Heinlein involved quite a bit of plot interactions in different time periods, mostly by means of cold sleep, but with a smidgen of actual time-machine travel. The narrator tracks down an eccentric inventor in his hermitage, and learns about his device. When loaded with equal masses on its two pans, it can send them into other times, one to the past and one to the future by equal time-intervals. He extracts this recollection from the inventor:
The narrator does manage to get sent back from 2001 to 1970 (both of which, I remind you, were part of the unclear future when the book was published). After some plot-heavy manipulations, towards the end of the story he reflects:
Here’s another CIHS: Comic I Haven’t Seen. The idea here is to sample comics that are unfamiliar to the CIDU readership, for better or worse (Hey, that’s not a bad idea for a strip name.)
The idea of Suburban Fairy Tales is to take familiar characters and riff off them in a somewhat modern environment. In this case, we have the wolf and the 3rd little pig from The Three Little Pigs, a story some of us might be familiar with. Francis Bonnet, the cartoonist, has made a career in art and design, working as a graphic designer and cartoonist for over 20 years. Available at Comics Kingdom
Urban dictionary was no help on the 3 book words, except for this bit of localized British slang:
Merriam-Webster’s entry for booky just says it’s a synonym for bookish.
The “Book ‘Em Danno” meme doesn’t seem helpful in deciphering Lawton’s wordplay, either.
For Mothers Day, a bit of both-parental sentiment from Bliss:
Probably obvious, but for the record, it is Susan (the character shown) herself who is trying to give up caffeine.
The Hax advice column this accompanies is here.
TBH, I don’t entirely understand this. I mean, I understand the heartwarming message about group loyalty and generosity — but not whether there was actually supposed to be anything funny.
Wait, could this be heading for an idiom-origins story about “bought the farm”? No? Nah!
We’re used to the Diamond Lil strip attempting a pun every day, and often organizing a week’s worth on a repeating pattern. Here it’s even the very same joke mechanism six times over.
I guess I missed out Part I. This is trying hard, maybe too hard, but deserves to be seen for cheerful persistence even if not really for brilliant OY-ness.
Since this strip seems to offer a pun every day, it is hard not to over-indulge. But this one was immediately right in the OY spirit!
Ohhhh nooo! There is no way to stop at just one!
Why “Mission Impossible”? I’ve never thought that flan was that difficult to make:
P.S. I’m sure that it will taste better, but I still think the Monty Python melody would have been a superior choice.
Thanks much to Powers for sharing this pair of recent strips, with very similar jokes. (Further striking that they were adjacent on his local paper’s comics page!) … Oh, and pretty good jokes to boot.
Although CIDU is no longer actively soliciting “synchronicity” submissions, sometimes exceptions must be made. Both of these editorial comics appeared two weeks ago, on Wednesday, April 24th; by coincidence they just happened to be right next to each other in my daily link list (but that was only because of the alphabetical proximity of the author’s names).
P.S. CIDU Bill was exceedingly strict with his requirements for the “synchronicity” tag. They had to be published on exactly the same day, and it was more than just the appearance of an identical object or concept in each comic: the setup or point of the joke had to be the same.
Comics I Don't Understand 