Comic Strips and the Butterfly Effect
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The Changes This Week
When cartoonists are able to see their comic strips in print they notice things and make changes.
Case in point is Rosebuds by Dee Parson. Rosebuds began running daily in Dee’s local paper and he was finally able to see it regularly on a daily which resulted in him making s slight change. Says Deon:
Seeing Rosebuds in newspapers allows me to check and change things most people wouldn’t notice.
This week [of April 6] I made the lettering bigger, and it’s made a world of a difference.
Above: the bottom strip is from last week, the top strip is from this week.
I just may run out of space in my small notebook keeping track of cartoonists Aquino and DeJoy sharing drawing duties on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not panel, daily and Sunday. And because of their abnormal scheduling I have to also note that, yeah, their changeovers takes place between a Monday and a Tuesday or someone will eventually call me on that and think I messed up the dates.
Synchronicity Squared
Fish Stories. This Spring fish swam into the comics pages.
With change of seasons Ben by Daniel Shelton and JumpStart by Robb Armstrong began featuring the kids therein getting interested in fish as pets. Both those storylines started on March 23 (linked above).
Then this week Will Henry had Wallace the Brave get into the swim of things.
The butterflies are back!
Don’t know if it was the butterflies I saw while out and about that made me notice the comics featuring the colorful creatures, or if it was the other way around.
Dave Whamond’s Reality Check and Don Wimmer’s Rose is Rose both featured the fluttering lepidoptera yesterday, while Fry and Lewis had Hammy welcome back his friends all week in Over the Hedge.
Stuff and Nonsense
Innuendo is now a regular part of comics, that is why we have The Comic Strip Censor showing up in Pearls Before Swine. But it unexpectedly showed up in one of the last places I would have thought this week.
The Spats by Jeff Pickering is a part of King Features Weekly Service which supplies content to weekly newspapers in smaller towns. The joke this week struck me as something that would elicit letters from the dowdy, old-fashioned newspaper subscribers I think of in those communities. Am I wrong?
Here’s my occasional plea for King Features to add Pickering’s and Gary Kopervas’ Out on a Limb and Dave T. Phipps’ Just Like Cats and Dogs comic strips to Comics Kingdom as they did Amber Waves.
Speaking Of Pearls…
I like Stephan Pastis using the circulation numbers of Pearls Before Swine as the basis of a funny gag. And Rat is right, that is an impressive number of newspapers running the comic.
After showing us that the Cutie Patootie Gang’s hideout was The Skull Cave I was more than a little disappointed that once inside we didn’t see a giant penny or a Flintstones-era batmobile. At the very least a stuffed dinosaur!
Say! When is the last time we saw Dinny in Alley Oop?
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