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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Cartoon Classic: Guindon

Published: July 25, 2012 1 minute 9 comments

Guindon121980
I'm still on the road, so posting the day's cartoons remains a problem, but the flipside is that I have more chances for inspiration. For example, visiting my niece, freshly back from the Peace Corps and heading crosscountry to NYC for grad school, brings to mind this 1980 cartoon by Richard Guindon.

The distance from Colorado to New York is actually a little more than 1,700 miles; more like 2,000, but I still brought this one up to wave in her face and remind her to break the drive down a little. Which, being quite a bit brighter than I was at her age, she had already determined to do.

Guindon was never the success in syndication his fans thought he should be, which Alan Holtz of the Stripper's Guide attributes to being too smart for the house: "Guindon is a prime example of brilliant writing that shot so far over Aunt Sally's head she didn't even hear the sonic boom when it passed." 

I don't know how cerebral you have to be, but, as with VIP and Steig, if you're looking for a joke where a rich man falls in the mud or somebody gets a pie in the face, you're not likely to enjoy Guindon.

As my mother would say to fussy eaters, "Well, then, that's more for the rest of us!"

Somehow, I never amassed a lot of Guindons, despite there being a few collections available, and perhaps I'll remedy that problem.

Meanwhile, there are several examples of his quirky, cerebral, it-might-take-you-a-minute humor at the Stripper's Guide page linked above, and at his own site, linked to his name at the start.

And here are a couple more that I swiped from the latter place, to whet your appetite and send you at least there, if not to Amazon.

Guindon2

 

Guindon3

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Comments 9

  1. The first example reminds me of a radio ad for a Lasik business in the SF Bay Area that has a tag line that bugs the bejeebers out of me: “Dr. Hyver can see you in San Ramon, Santa Clara, and Daly City!” Why would anybody go to an eye surgeon who’s blind everywhere else?
    I don’t get the second one at all, but I find it strangely erotic.

  2. It took me awhile, too, Sherwood, but it’s worth prolonging the contemplation. I’ll leave it to Mike to decide whether (or when) to give hints.

  3. Sherwood, I’m with you. Mike, any hints?

  4. Well, a hint would be to simply imagine the traditional setting the cartoon is riffing on. Although I’d say that’s a rather good-looking model, rather than just some random hand who needed a little extra pocket money, which is more traditional, I think.

  5. Ahem. I actually did get it — my hint is in the last sentence of the original comment.

  6. OK, I need more than a hint here. (What I have so far suggests some kind of streetcorner hand-signal, with which I am not familiar – but that doesn’t explain why the class is made up of Kuklas.)

  7. I Sherwood like to understand this cartoon.

  8. . . .and having written “kuklas” it only took me another 2 hours or so to get the joke; would have been quicker but that’s not one of the first three words in Turkish.
    (Found my Guindon collection – it’s /Guindon/, from 1977. I probably saw some of his stuff in /The Realist/ as well.)

  9. Oh, good Lord, they ARE all Kuklas. I may have to go lie down …

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