Recent Comments

1. 3 days ago on Rip Haywire

   Yes you can, actually. I’ve done it before, only to have my cat wake me up before I was finished reading.

   (Nutshell: In the dream I was in an arcade, and one of the pinball machines was advertising a contest where you could win your own machine.)

2. 3 days ago on Al Goodwyn Editorial Cartoons

   This one in particular is in response to a recent Apple products advertisement where they used a machine to crush a wide variety of items symbolizing various creative properties (et al) and compress them into a single device. Due to the way the advertisement was set up it was very poorly received.

3. 5 days ago on Nest Heads

   At the time the strip was first published (note the 2007 copyright date) the media was hyping an obesity epidemic in children in the United States and fingering fast food as the culprit.

   In reality, actual scholars & experts noted that school lunch programs had more to do with obesity rates than fast food, and it was ultimately discovered that several parents who were on TV screaming about how fast food made their kids obese were feeding their kids fast food as many as 3 meals a day.

4. 5 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Could be he was just that exhausted after everything.

5. 5 days ago on Pickles

   In real life, many people – myself included – experience this. It’s an issue with the nervous system and the skin falsely registering sensations, and there are a great many things that can cause this.

6. 8 days ago on FurBabies

   Bill Watterson wrote in one of his Calvin & Hobbes collections that due to the way printing technology was at the time he had to have his Sundays turned in much further ahead of time than his dailies, as it took a fair bit of time to get the color plates and whatnot ready to print his Sundays. This played a part in his decision to not tie his Sundays into the daily story arcs if he could avoid it.

7. 10 days ago on Pickles

   Even though author Bryan Crane hasn’t been able to out-and-out say it in the strip, he’s found ways to make it clear that the characters are, like Crane himself, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

   On Sundays, most men who are adherents of the faith will wear white button-up shirts and neckties to services if plausible for them to do so, the classic old-school “Sunday best”.

   As part of it, young men are often encouraged from a young age to start wearing white shirts and ties like their dads and grandfathers. It can even be a bonding moment when dad teaches their kid how to tie that tie.

8. 14 days ago on Ziggy

   To me at least, this strip is actually a little bittersweet in hindsight.

   In 2004, 11 years after the strip was published, CBS News producer Mary Mapes would be in such a hurry to get a politically-sensitive story to air ahead of the election that she would fail to do her due diligence. If she had, she would have realized that there was reason to doubt the provenance of some documents she had been given as “evidence” of a sensational claim and that the story was a non-starter. Instead, she did such a devastating number on CBS News’ reputation that the “60 Minutes” program she was in charge of was cancelled and everyone involved either fired or forced into early retirement as a way to control the damage.

9. 15 days ago on Eric Allie

   Or… we could look to hire people based on their competence in their field, the solidness of their credentials, and their willingness to make sure that students understand the subject matter?

   That’s the present situation: too many professors feel that their classroom is their kingdom, not a place of learning.

10. 17 days ago on Thatababy

    In theory, the comic book industry should be a meritocracy.

    In prior practice, it used to be that writers and artists started out by cutting their teeth on lower-tier books, using those books to build their skills and their reputation before being promoted to working on higher-tier books.

    In current practice, however, an obsessive focus on “authenticity” has led to a number of editors at Marvel, DC, and a few other publishers only assigning writers to work on books whose characters are “just like” those writers. This has functionally destroyed the classic meritocracy approach, resulting in several good writers being pigeon-holed and several inexperienced writers being put on books that their otherwise thin resumes previously wouldn’t have permitted them to work on.

    Industry legend Christopher Priest called this out in an interview he did a few years ago when he explained why he chose to work with Dynamite on their then-current revival of “Vampirella” despite his resume being such that he could have demanded to work on any project he desired: Marvel and DC were only contacting him when they wanted him to work on characters of his same race, and he was sick of it.

    This is a big part of why we’re now seeing a great many would-be writers and artists going indie or resorting to crowd-funding, because they no longer trust the major publishers to judge them on their individual merits.