It should come as little surprise that I'm always in search of comics I can read online. Not only am I finding new comics to enjoy but I'm also finding new sources that I can use to find more new comics. It was through one of those avenues (and I honestly can't remember which) that I came across a series of politically-oriented comics.

Now, political humor in comics is nothing new. As I recall, the very first instances of what we might recognize as word balloons were created for a political cartoon. And, of course, editorial cartoons frequently point out some of the absurdities of politics, to the point where several cartoonists have had very real death threats on their lives because their caricatures were published in the "wrong" country. About once every four years any more, there's usually a handful of semi-obligatory discussions with then-prominent cartoonists about capturing and exaggerating the likenesses of the day's politicians.

But what's interesting about political comics is that there's an inherent ideology behind many, if not most, of them. Take a non-political strip like Calvin & Hobbes or Garfield or Peanuts. Yes, those strips absolutely reflect the views and interests of the creators, and their humorousness is (like all humorousness) subjective. But they're also not reinforcing the beliefs of a specific group. (Sure, there's been some argument that Charles Schulz was promoting a decidedly Christian world-view, and I can see that in some strips, but his humor was largely not religiously allegorical.)

On the other hand, you can take a Doonsebury or a Slowpoke and the creators take a pretty decisive political stand on any number of issues. Gary Trudeau regularly points out the awfulness of Trump, and Jen Sorenson is usually even more pointed with what a shitstain he is. (Although I don't believe she's actually used the word "shitstain" yet.) And in both cases, I chuckle to myself because they both are promoting an ideology similar to my own by poking fun at those with opposing ideologies. When you really boil it down, even the forward-thinking, generally more high-brow approach Trudeau takes is essentially just a means of validation for my own beliefs.

"Ha ha! He's so stupid because he has different opinion and that makes me a better person!"

Not all political comics are quite so blatant about it, of course, but that's the basic message a lot of them carry. There's no idealogical validation in Frazz or Bob the Squirrel because the characters are fictional, and the only ideology they represent (largely) is the one imposed on them by the reader. By taking the leap into politics through political caricature, the creator is obliged to bring with him/her the ideology -- or at least an approximation of the ideology -- of the person(s) they're caricaturing. A drawing of Kamala Harris or J.D. Vance will inherently be imbued with some aspects of the character because they're already public figures with much of their character known and disseminated via news outlets. That includes their ideology.

But here's the thing: even knowing that, I was still struck by some decidedly right-wing comics of Carl Moore's (now-defunct) State of the Union. "That's not funny! He's citing specific criteria that doesn't begin to represent Barack Obama accurately!" Well, of course not! Because Moore was trying to do the exact same thing from an opposing ideology. He's validating the beliefs of people other than myself. It still took me a minute to calm down after my initial reaction. It's not a comic for me because I'm not the audience he's aiming for; he's attacking many of my ideological beliefs for the benefit of people who disagree with me. He's validating their beliefs just as Gary Trudeau validates mine.

People of all stripes try to knock down their opponents, whether or not the candidates themselves agree with them. That comes out on talk shows, blogs, op. ed. pieces, and comics. However, while everyone is entitled to their own opinion, if that opinion includes de-humanizing other people... if that opinion includes dismissing an entire class of people because of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability... if that opinion includes actively trying to make their lives worse or even entirely forfeit... if that opinion includes doing any of that while denying you're doing so or, worse, claiming that you're doing it for the betterment of your in-group... You can fuck right the fuck off! Even the most openly right-wing cartoonist* -- Bruce Tinsley of Mallard Fillmore -- has pulled back on the political messages of his cartoons, realizing how corrupt and downright cruelty-is-the-point evil his historical political party has become.

My point is that, if you find a cartoon that suggests more taxes should be spent on roads as compared to the electrical grid, you can have a civil disagreement about that, but don't lambast the cartoonist over it. That's a difference of opinion. Save it for the assholes who say immigrants are all rapists and murderers who eat puppies. (Damn, I wish I was just exaggerating for effect in that last sentence!)

* While some may claim Scott Adams and Ben Garrison also fall into the right-wing cartoonist camp, I would argue that Adams is no longer a cartoonist since Dilbert got axed, and Garrison... well, he draws pictures but I wouldn't call him a cartoonist. Cartoonists poke fun at political figures and situations using illustrations, and rely on visual analogies and iconography to get their points across. Their job is to know (and thus be able to draw) symbols. That is the very heart of their job. To convey ideas to readers using symbols. And Garrison has repeatedly shown that he is phenomenally inept at drawing symbols, sometimes getting them so wrong that his cartoons wind up making a point that is 180° opposite to what he intends. So I would not consider Garrison a cartoonist at all. Just a racist asshole who draws racist images.

Niklas Eriksson started Carpe Diem in 2007, but it only began getting syndicated from King Features in 2015. Like many syndicated single panel comics, it has no regular characters or continuity, and just trades on gags. Here is the strip that ran this past Saturday...

Setting aside whatever you think of the joke itself, you might find yourself scratching your head a bit trying to parse the dialogue. The problem with it is that it's missing the word "from" as evidenced by the vertically oriented version of the strip...

It's pretty obvious that, in re-working the strip from one format to the other, the word balloon had to be re-sized and re-placed, and in changing the word-wrapping, the word "from" accidentally got deleted. These strips -- or at least the lettering -- were handled digitially, so dropping a word is extremely easy to do. An unfortunate accident, but not overly detrimental to the joke. It almost still works as is since it's not an uncommon trope to portray cavemen speaking in broken English anyway.

I'll point out, too, that I don't know what language Eriksson works in natively and, if it's not English, whether or not he does his own translation work. It's entirely possible the strip was written in Swedish and translated/re-lettered by an employee of King Features. In fact, it's possible Eriksson has never seen this English version of the strip.

But I'd like to point out the different issue in the vertical strip. The smoke rising from the volcano in the background is drawn in almost the exact same way and follows a similar parallel path to the word balloon. So it almost looks as if there's someone behind the volcano saying the exact same thing at the exact same time as the strip's actual speaker. The horizontal strip avoids this problem by A) not overlapping the word balloon with the volcano at all and B) depicting the word balloon in a different style, using a dashed line to convey more of a whisper.

Here again, I don't know precisely how Eriksson works. I know I've seen other artists who do similarly formatted strips -- notably Wiley Miller of Non-Sequitir -- draw their single panel comics in a kind of plus-sign format that allows for two sets of cropping. (See right.) This gives the artist a fairly high degree of control over what the multiple formats look like. But it's also possible that Eriksson draws his strip in a single format and, again, a King Features employee digitally re-crops it to fit an alternate format. That would explain why we're seeing two different styles of word balloons above. In fact, between that and the poor word balloon placement in the vertical format, I'd guess that Eriksson normally draws in the horizontal format and it's a graphic design intern or something handling the modifications.

(Look closely at the top of the volcano smoke in the the vertical strip. You can see a small glitch or "bump" in the line width where the original top of the horizontal panel crossed through, and someone had to extend it upwards to meet the word balloon.)

I don't point all this out to fault either Eriksson or King Features. I don't think Eriksson himself had anything to do with the "errors" to begin with, and trying to re-format a daily strip to a format it's not designed for... well, I get they're trying to work with different cultural/societal standards, and doing this on a daily basis is going to be a grind. And of all the possible things that could go sideways with this kind of situation, this is minimally problematic. But it does showcase how just the simple, regular production processes can impact a comic. Not every strip has to deal with precisely these issues, of course, but I point all this out to highlight that there are frequently unseen-to-the-casual viewer ways that a strip's humor or even basic legibility can be compromised at no fault of the creator!

I've found myself checking out Three Stooges shorts lately as a way to combat the seemingly never-ending barrage of hatred and maliciousness coming out of Washington DC these days. The Stooges were something of a staple while I was growing up with our local UHF station frequently running one or two of them before their regular Saturday noon-time B-movie monster matinee. (All presented by Marty Sullivan a.k.a. Superhost!) I enjoyed the shorts, but never to the point where I became particularly obsessed with them as seems to happen with some of their fans. Between that and the sheer volume of shorts they made, I'm certain I've never seen all their work. So watching them now is still newly entertainly despite their often recyclying of jokes. There's obviously a childish appeal to the Stooges' brand of nonsense violent comedy, which is a quite welcome distraction.

With that setup, I recently caught (for I believe the first time) Tassles in the Air in which, owing to both the Stooges' incompetence and a bit of coincidence, the trio of basic tradesmen are mistaken for a highly sought-after interior decorator. The expected chaos ensues and the short ends with the Stooges having full paint buckets dropped on their heads. But of note for my purposes here is the opening shot, in which actor Bud Jamison is seen relaxing while reading the comics portion of the newspaper...

He's shown reading the funnies specifically to set the character up as Jiggs-type of person. That is, he's wealthy but only very newly so and he still enjoys the pleasures of his working class roots. Note also that he's got his shoes off and his feet kicked up. That, and reading the comics, are all signs that he's not a "real" artistocrat and when his wife enters, her intention to hire a famous interior designer becomes one born more of making appearances than an actual interest in aesthetics.

But, hey, that's a reasonably clear shot of the back side of that newspaper! Can we figure out what he's reading?

As it turns out, yes, pretty easily in fact. Because of those aforementioned obsessiveness of some Stooges fans, we know this particular short was filmed between November 26–30, 1937. So the newspaper is likely from around that time. Secondly, a good portion of the comic's title header is visible. The letters "POLEON" are pretty legible. And what do you know? There was a comic called Napoleon and Uncle Elby that ran from 1932-1957! It's also pretty clear the comic takes up at least half the page, so we're talking about a Sunday strip most likely. So, in theory, all we have to do is look at the Napoleon Sunday strips from November 1937!

And, hey, we're in luck again! "Jon the Scanner" has uploaded scans of all the Sunday strips for 1935-1937 to Comic Book Plus! Working backwards from the last strip, we soon come across one that has a header image that looks strikingly like what we see in the Stooges short. The pipe and deerstalker profiles are pretty unmistakable!

You can see the strip is clearly dated October 31, 1937 so the timing mostly lines up as well. (Although, if filming started on November 26, I don't know why they'd be using a newspaper that's nearly a month old at that point. I would normally have expected one from November 21 or maybe 14. Although maybe using a slightly older one meant the paper was more supple and less likely to make noise picked up by the studio mics?)

Question asked and answered!

I'll note, too, since Napoleon and Uncle Elby isn't especially well-known these days, the strip was created by Clifford McBride in 1932, originally just titled Napoleon. McBride had actually introduced the characters as sporadic regulars in his previous strip Clifford McBride's Pantomime Comic before spinning them off into their own feature. The Uncle Elby character was in fact there at the start but only given title billing after the first year. The strip has basically the same setup as Marmaduke -- a large ungainly dog doing doggish things much to the consternation of his owner -- although McBride often kept his strip wordless, leaving the actions to stand on their own. McBride continued the strip until his death in 1950 (or '51 -- I've seen conflicting dates) at which time his wife, Margot Fischer McBride, picked up writing the strip while hiring at various points artists Roger Armstrong, Joseph Messerli, and Ed Nofziger to illustrate it. The Sunday strip ended in 1955 and the daily one in 1960.

Today is Jim Davis' 80th birthday. To celebrate, let's study this "undated" (you'll see why I use quotes in a bit) photo of him...

What I find interesting is how much we can glean from him by other elements in the shot.

First, in the upper right, you can see the bottom of the famous Farrah Fawcett poster, allegedly the single best-selling poster in history. The poster was actually the idea of Pro Arts Inc. who hired Bruce McBroom to shoot Fawcett, who did her own hair and makeup for the shoot as she was still mostly known for small, bit-parts on television at the time. The poster came out in early 1976 and was so popular that it led to her getting a starring role in Charlie's Angels later that year. The poster sold even better after the show's popularity took off. I mention the history a bit here because there's an implication that he kept that poster up for several years, as we'll see in a minute.

The next item of interest is the calendar. Although the date is a little fuzzy, the image helps to confirm it's March 1979. The image is a relatively identifiable Kliban cat cartoon. Bernard Kliban's cat comics first became quite popular in 1975 with his first book, and the first Kliban cat calendar came out in 1977. The first calendar was the best-selling calendar of that year, and Kliban calendars continued to be the best-seller every year through 1981. Although not visible in the black and white photo above, that cat above the March 5-6 boxes is colored orange like Garfield.

Next, there's a comic section from the newspaper visible on Davis's desk. I'm guessing it's The Chronicle-Tribune based out of Marion, IN. Davis, I believe, was actually living in nearby Muncie at the time but the Muncie newspaper is The Star Press, and there seem to be too many letters in the masthead for that. Regardless, plainly visible before the fold are the top two panels of a Peanuts Sunday strip. I believe that's the March 4, 1979 strip; there are only two Sunday strips between 1976 and 1980 that feature Charlie Brown by himself in the first panel, and him with Lucy in the second. (It's possible that it's an even longer timeframe there; that's just as far as I went in either direction.)

So the photo is at the earliest from March 4, 1979, although possibly a little later. Davis would have been a little shy of 34th birthday and likely had that Fawcett poster hanging up for at least a few years by that point.

The Garfield strip Davis seems to be work on, though? We can actually see the whole thing pretty clearly. It actually ran in newspapers on October 29, 1978, about four months prior to the earliest date this could've been photographed.

My guess is that he wanted to use a Sunday strip since those are just bigger and would take up more of his art board, and four months seems that it would be about the right amount of time for a syndicate to get his original art back to him after he sent it in for production. (Recall this is 1979 and you couldn't send files electronically yet.) So I can see it being possible that this was actually the latest Sunday strip he had original art for, but had already been published. I can also see him not wanting to use an as-yet-unpublished strip as that might give away the joke before readers saw the actual strip itself in their newspaper. But I could be over-thinking it, and he just simply liked that strip for whatever reason.

What I find interesting is the three non-Garfield elements we can use to date this photo are three of the most popular pop culture items of their respective genres. The most popular comic, the most popular calendar, the most popular poster. You could say they were the most broadly appealing items of their day. I find it interesting that Davis gravitates towards that so strongly, even in his personal life. Davis was always clear that he tried to write Garfield to be as broadly appealing as possible. In a 1982 interview, he stated, "It's a conscious effort to include everyone as readers. If you were to mention the football strike, you're going to be excluding everyone else in the world that doesn't watch pro football... I don't use rhyming gags, plays on words, colloquialisms, in an effort to make Garfield apply to virtually any society where he may appear. In an effort to keep the gags broad, the humor general and applicable to everyone, I deal mainly with eating and sleeping. That applies to everyone, anywhere."

So that he himself is so strongly influenced by and seeks out the most popular is interesting. What I don't know is that because he just liked stuff that everybody else seemed to like, or was he actually studying those items to determine what made them popular? In that same interview, he also said, "I'd like to say it was some sort of a divine inspiration that created the strip. In fact, it wasn't so much that as a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character. I've been trying to get syndicated for eight years. That's a lot of time to try to figure out what makes some strips go and others fail... It's essentially a formula. I notice dog strips are doing well, and I knew an animal strip would be strong. People aren't threatened by an animal. They have a lot of latitude. Do a lot of things that humans can't. By virtue of being a cat, Garfield's not black, white, male or female, young, or old or a particular nationality. He's not going to step on anyone's feet if these thoughts are coming from an animal."

So did he get that Kliban calendar because he actually likes Kliban cats (I've never heard him mention Kliban as an influence) or was he just doing research for how to make Garfield more marketable? The cynic in me says the latter, particularly in light of multiple times Davis has claimed that he chose to make Garfield a cat because he "noticed that nobody had yet created a popular comic about a cat." It seems hard to claim that when he had a Kliban cat calendar on his wall only a few months after he created the character. I can't find Davis mentioning Kliban at all until 2015, although he clearly had at least an awareness of him early on.

I've kind of felt this way for a while, but I feel it kind of makes Davis seem more and more like Bob Kane, and I'm left thinking he's better at crafting a story about himself than he is about crafting one for the comics pages.

With San Diego Comic-Con starting later this week, I expect most folks' attention will be focused on either the goings-on there and/or getting prepared for the goings-on there, and either way not really caring too much about inconsequential blogs like this. With that in mind, I'm just going to be re-posting some older material that is out of date enough (from a technological or emotive or cultural or whatever perspective) that it would take more effort than I'm willing to put in to try to update it to bring it up to 2025. Basically, it's going to be a low-effort week on my part because no one's going to be paying attention anyway. Here's a piece I wrote in 2008...

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My dad recently found and passed along to me his copy of The Return of Pogo. I'd read bits and pieces of Walt Kelly's work before, but never to my recollection more than a strip or two at a time. I was excited to see one of the greats "in action."

As I began reading through the book, though, I remembered that I had in fact read it before. That very book in fact. I didn't get past page one without laughing out loud and recalling that I laughed out loud at the very same joke years ago when I must have snagged it off Dad's bookshelf. (The joke, by the way, centered around that fact that Churchy was worried because Friday the 13th was fast approaching, and it was on a Monday!)

But reading through it again, some two and a half decades after my initial run-through, I wasn't surprised that it didn't leave a greater impression on me as a kid. The jokes that a 10/11 year old might get are amusing, certainly, but largely pretty broad in scope. What impressed me reading through the book this weekend was how much social and political commentary Kelly filled his stories with. Lots of references that make no sense without some semblance of understanding the various complexities grown-ups face in day-to-day life. Brilliance in nuanced subtlety.

Like many children of the 1970s, I grew up on Sesame Street. I stumbled across the show again in college and realized just how much of it was in fact aimed at adults. An architect named Frank Lloyd Left, for example. Or the derby-wearing Brit who provided absurd non-sequiturs and went by the name Monty. It was a kid's show that understood that parents might well be watching as well.

I think Kelly took a different approach. He wrote a comic strip for adults, with the understanding that kids would probably read it too. The funniest stuff is clever and insightful and thought-provoking, but a good pie-in-the-face gag never hurt anyone either!

So, how do you fall in love with Pogo? Simple. Wait until you're out of college, then pick up any collection of his work. You won't be sorry!

You know, for as many great reprint collections are available these days, there's something to be said for seeing old comic strips in their original context. You ever look at an actual newspaper comics page from the mid-20th century? Here's The Calgary Herald from March 22, 1949...

You might notice that it doesn't look all that different from today's newspaper. Cramped page, crossword, horoscope... Heck, even Mary Worth and Dagwood are still around! The printing quality has improved a bit, but the jokes haven't.

I really try to sympathize with companies that aren't able to keep up with the times. After all, there are people -- real, hard working people -- who put these newspapers together, not to mention the various comic artists whose work you see every day. But if you haven't appreciably changed anything about your product in three quarters of a century, it's really hard for me to justify why you're still even around.

Way back in John Byrne's run on The Fantastic Four, he had Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman adopt secret identities to try to raise their child Franklin in a "normal" household. They bought a place in Belle Porte, Connecticut and created the identities of Reed and Sue Benjamin, and eventually had a house warming to invite all their new neighbors over in FF #276. And, if you weren't aware, their neighbors are largely residents of the newspaper funny pages...

That's Hi and Lois at the door (as you can see, they're specifically identified by name). Going clockwise from there, we have Joe and Ann Palooka (from Joe Palooka), Dick Tracy (from Dick Tracy), Henry Mitchell (from Dennis the Menace), Herb Woodley and Dagwood & Blondie Bumsted (from Blondie), and Loretta & Leroy Lockhorn (from The Lockhorns). In the center are Skeezix (from Gasoline Alley) and Jiggs (from Bringing Up Father). Although Skeezix does look a bit more like Uncle Walt to me, Byrne himself has identified the character as Skeezix.

In any event, the party goes off without a hitch and as Reed and Sue are cleaning up, they're attacked by Elspeth Cromwell, a witch-hunter who mistakenly believes them to be witches. Things go south from there and, by the end of the issue, the neighborhood is being overrun the Knights of Hades, multiple houses are shown on fire, and finally Mephisto himself pops up!

In the next issue, Dr. Strange shows up, Franklin uses some mysterious powers to banish Mephisto again, and the good guys win the day. However...

When Dr. Strange first arrives, Reed, Sue, Franklin, and Elspeth appear dead. Their bodies have been recovered by the police, who are apparently still waiting for an ambulance. The officer also notes the neighbors mentioned the house warming party. Most of the rest of the story takes place in Mephisto's realm and when the villain is vanquished, Reed, Sue and Franklin wake up from where their bodies were lying on the street while Elspeth remains motionless. Dr. Strange confirms that she is not only dead but that her soul has been claimed by whichever demon she had actually bargained with.

The initial implication is that Elspeth is the only one who perished. But when local busybody Alma Chalmers begs Dr. Strange to recover her, he says he can't and adds, "Remember the terrible price these people paid for your acts!"

THESE PEOPLE. Plural. Not one person. Not just Elspeth. THESE PEOPLE. Multiple people died during this event and we've already identified all the main characters and their respective statuses, so who snuffed it?

There was only one person shown dead, but we had clearly seen multiple houses on fire and destroyed. So the further implication is that SOME OF THE CLASSIC COMIC STRIP CHARACTERS DIED!

We can pretty safely say Jiggs wasn't killed -- he (and his wife Maggie) show up in Power Pack #47 a few years later. Hi and Lois probably survived, too; they're identified as living in "the second house on the next block" and while there was a lot of damage in the area immediately surrounding Reed and Sue's house, it doesn't seem to have spread too far. But what about everybody else? You might think, "Well, I can read all these characters in the newspaper every day! Just because they don't appear in Marvel comics any more doesn't mean they died! Byrne was just having a little fun!"

Here's the thing, though: you CAN'T read these characters in the newspaper every day! Not all of them! Blondie? Sure. The Lockhorns? Yes. Dick Tracy? Yup. Somehow, even Gasoline Alley is still going strong! But you know what comic isn't still around? Joe Palooka. It ended in November 1984, just a few months before FF #276! In the final Joe Palooka strips, Joe announces he's retiring from boxing, going to spend a little time with Ann and his parents, and "then... who knows?" He's last seen in the strip driving off into the sunset waving goodbye. The newspaper funnies have never seen Joe Palooka since.

So I maintain that when Dr. Strange said "the terrible price these people paid" he was talking about Elspeth Cromwell and Joe & Ann Palooka (possibly their kids as well). Obviously the situation was still in flux when the police officer first pointed Dr. Strange to the four apparently dead bodies; Joe and Ann must have been found after that, during the extended sequence in Mephisto's realm. Were they actually slain by the Knights of Hades, or were they simply caught in a house that had caught fire and/or collapsed? That we don't know. But we do know that they are not seen again, in either a Marvel comic, or in the newspapers where they originated!

There you have it! Joe Palooka, the famous comic strip character dating back to 1930, actually died in the pages of a Marvel comic only months after his own comic strip ended!

I happened to catch last week a Wizard of Id "Classics" in which The King and Sir Rodney were trying to catch The Lone Haranguer, a character who I don't think was ever seen (at least not clearly) and was known for shouting "The King is a fink!" much to the annoyance of The King. The idea that The King was regularly called a fink and that he tried to catch/imprison anyone who said as much was a running gag during Johnny Hart's tenure on the strip. Indeed, the first Wizard of Id collection from 1969 was titled "The King Is a Fink!" and the very first strip included in that collection uses a "the king is a fink" gag.

But it occurs to me that I haven't seen that gag for many years. Admittedly, I'm not a regular reader of Wizard of Id but I do follow some folks on social media who do nothing but post the day's comic strips and I can't recall the last time I saw a "the king is a fink" joke of any sort.

So I did a little digging. The most recent instance I can find of a variation on that joke is from 2014. Much later than I would've anticiapted.

It's not a very good gag, in my opinion, since I think the intent is to show that The King is the one who posted the new "definitions" to counter the graffiti's message, but his carrying the spray can suggests he was the one doing the original message to begin with. Regardless, it's a very clear indication the gag was still running after Johnny Hart's passing in 2007.

In fact, by 2014, the strip was being written by Hart's grandson Mason Mastroianni, who would additionally take over artistic duties from Jeff T. Parker a year later. But since Mastroianni had been writing the strip since 2007, that means he helped work on -- if not completely conceived of -- that strip I posted above. Meaning he is fully aware of the fink joke and its history in the strip.

I bring this up because I think that, given the current political situation in the United States, Mastroianni absolutely should make fink jokes a regular, if not downright frequent, thing. A small-minded, petty tyrant who takes incredible offense to the weakest of insults? Mastroianni could run "the King is a fink" jokes literally every day and they would be 100% topical to whatever the day's headlines were. I'm not sure how big the readership of Wizard of Id is these days, but I would bet regular fink jokes would bring it a lot more attention!

Here's Monday's installment of Ziggy...

And I immediately thought, "Wait, I thought Tom Wilson already did a thing with Ziggy wearing pants already? Why woud Ziggy need to demand pants now?"

Yeah, Stephen Pastis started 'harassing' Wilson about it back in 2009 directly in his Pearls Before Swine comic...

Pastis ran the campaign in Pearls through December 16, and on December 17, we have Ziggy confronted by his comics editor over in his comic...

The next day, Ziggy actually finds his pants (apparently they'd been lost by the dry cleaner) and starts wearing them on December 18...

That only lasted a few days, however, and by December 28, Ziggy was pantless once again...

So why now after 15 years, Ziggy feels the need to wear pants again -- feels strongly enough to go to assertiveness training to be able to make demands of Wilson -- I have no idea!

As I often do for holidays, I've gone through and collected all the comics from today that I can find referencing the holiday. Today is Memorial Day in the US, honoring military personnel who died in the line of duty. As a federal holiday, many workers have the day off and the start of good weather means many gather together for picnics and cookouts. There were a few comics I came across that did showcase a cookout of some sort and were maybe intended to be a Memorial Day reference, but as they didn't actually say that explicitly, I've left those out of the ones I have here.

The show Documentary Now did an episode a few years back that was a spoof of the type of documentary where a film maker goes on a quest to find their hero, recording all of it in order to make the film. In this case, the fictional novice film maker was looking for Gary Larson. Larson was no doubt chosen as the subject in part for his relative reclusiveness. I can only find one photo of him more recent than the 1980s, and video interviews with him are even more scarce. The closest there is to a 'public' appearance by Larson in the 21st century seems to be a short cameo in a 2010 episode of The Simpsons where he's drawn pretty much exactly how he looked 20 years earlier... With that said, I thought I'd share the only video interview with Larson I can find. It's a piece done by 20/20 back in 1986. I'm posting here as a sort of time capsule of the period.

As you may know, I sometimes do a scan of the funnies on holidays and such to see how many cartoonists do something to denote the occasion. Religious holidays are a little iffy since, as a newspaper cartoonist, you wouldn't want to alienate the part of your audience that isn't of that faith, though Christmas and Easter are often seen as secular enough to get a pass. Theoretically, uniquely American holidays like US Independence Day would also be a bit off limits depending on the global reach of your audience, although I think most American comics don't get much traction outside the States to begin with. Earth Day, though, is a global, secular holiday and you'd think that would be an easy one to throw on the calendar and give creators a go-to topic for gag every year. Given how few cartoonists seem to reference it, though, that does not appear to be the case. Here's all I could find this morning...

Rudolph Dirks created The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897 for William Randolph Hearst's American Humorist. Between 1912 and 1914, Dirks and Hearst got into a legal battle over the rights of the characters and Hearst was able to keep the rights to the Katzenjammer Kids name, getting a new artist, Harold H. Knerr, to draw the strip.

Dirks, though, created essentially the same strip again, this time calling it Hans und Fritz. In 1918, he renamed it to The Captain and the Kids and it directly competed with The Katzenjammer Kids for the next several decades, but both remained popular at least through the 1960s.

Here's an ad I stumbled across in a 1940 issue of Life technically featuring The Captain and the Kids, although it may as well have been the Katzenjammer Kids. I'm fairly confident Dirks himself created this.

Although... comic strip characters talking about how great it is to be regular? By eating "a natural laxative cereal"? Definitely falls under the "Too Much Information" category!