Today’s Zippy, with a cartoon transformation:

The three Dingburgers admiring Little Zippy (already cartoon characters) become more and more like cartoon characters, more cartoonish, more cartoony: bigger eyes, bigger ears, longer noses.

The strip combines three themes: playful morphology in Zippy; ostentatious -ity; and the conventions of cartooning. Postings on these themes, on Language Log and here:

☛ AZ on LLog, 8/28/06: Playing with your morphology:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003514.html
ostentations -ity in Nougatocity

☛ AZ on LLog, 8/29/06: Bogosity:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003515.html

☛ AZ on LLog, 3/1/07: Get Fuzzy gets playful:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004254.html
seriosity ‘seriousness’: ostentatious –ity

☛ AZ on LLog, 5/12/07: Zippy’s suffixiness:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004489.html
especially on -iness

☛ 6/1/13: cartoony:
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/06/01/cartoony/
in the last panel, Zippy becomes more cartoony by developing big eyes

☛ 10/14/13: Zippifixation:
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/10/14/zippifixation/

Bill Griffith is fond of playful morphology: here, humorology ‘the study of humor’ and humorologist, plus humorosity ‘humorousness’.
… I don’t find any humorology or humorosity elsewhere on the Zippy site (though its search program sometimes misses things). But Zippy strips have other ostentatious derivatives in -osity (especially randomosity ‘randomness’) and other novel formations in -ology

☛ 7/30/14: More Zippy playful morphology:
http://arnoldzwicky.org/2014/07/30/more-zippy-playful-morphology/

Another chapter in Zippy’s playful morphology, notably with -ity: seriosity and goofiosity.

[plus cartoonishness]

From the March 3rd webcomic Sheldon, A conversation between Arthur the talking duck and a character in the comic, a garrulous stereotypical Frenchman, negotiating the character’s getting off the strip so that the business of the strip can move on:

(Hat tip to David Craig on Facebook.)

Stereotypical Frenchness: the accent, the philosophical musing, the beret, the cigarette, the striped shirt.

On the webcomic, from Wikipedia:

Sheldon is a daily webcomic created by Dave Kellett. The comedic strip centers on the odd family unit of 10-year old software billionaire Sheldon, his grandfather guardian and his talking duck, Arthur.

Today’s Zippy, another exercise in cartoonization, a transformation of an image (in this case, Magritte’s Le therapeute) by stages into a Zippy scene:

(#1)

The Magritte original:

(#2)

The story so far: On 3/5/15 I posted a Zippy transformation of a Magritte (The Son of Man) and the next day on another cartoonization, saying:

Zippy has been featuring cartoonizations: transformations in three panels into a cartoon character. Yesterday Magritte’s man with apple ended up as Zippy with bowling ball. Today, a man painting a bird in flight ends up as Zippy painting Tweety Bird (a bird in the hand, as the title has it)

It turns out that that was not just a man, inspired by contemplating an egg, painting a bird in flight, but another Magritte, La clairvoyance:

(#3)

Bill Griffith has been on a Magritte run of cartoonization. In addition to the three mentioned above:

The Zippy of 3/3, and its Magritte original, The Lovers !!:

(#3)

(#4)

The Zippy of 3/4, and its original, The Lovers:

(#5)

(#6)

The Zippy of 3/7, and its original, L’acte de foi (literally, ‘Act of Faith’, better ‘Leap of Faith’):

(#7)

(#8)

And the Zippy of 3/9, and its original, Attempting the Impossible:

(#9)

(#10)

That leaves one Zippy unaccounted for, the first in the series, from 3/2:

(#9)

Suggestions as to the source?

Today’s Zippy:

  (#1)

The strip is both entertaining and instructive on its own, but then Bill Griffith would be unlikely to just invent a creepy cartoon character. And then there’s the title, “Peachy Keen”.

One possibility is that the big-head horror is an amalgam of two creations: the cartoonish game character Princess Peach and the also cartoonish big-eyed children painted by Margaret Keane.

Princess Peach. From Wikipedia:

Princess Peach is a character in Nintendo’s Mario franchise. Originally created by Shigeru Miyamoto, Peach is the princess of the fictional Mushroom Kingdom, which is constantly under attack by Bowser. She often plays the damsel in distress role within the series and is the lead female. She is often portrayed as Mario’s love interest and has appeared in nearly all the Mario games to date; with the most notable being in Super Princess Peach where she is the main playable character.

  (#2)

Margaret Keane. From Wikipedia:

Margaret D. H. Keane (born Peggy Doris Hawkins; 1927) is an American artist, who mainly paints women, children, and animals with big eyes, in oil or mixed media. … In the 1960s her artwork was sold under the name of her husband, Walter Keane, who claimed credit for it.

An example:

  (#3)

But maybe there’s a more direct model for the character in #1.

In response to my Zippy posting earlier today in which I looked for the source of the strip’s title, “Peachy Keen”, Drew Smith suggested that the peach part came from the strip Miss Peach rather than (my suggestion) the game character Princess Peach. At issue was the model or models for a grotesquely big-headed character in the Zippy. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but now I see that Miss Peach seems not to have come up on this blog, so it would be worth discussing.

From Wikipedia:

Miss Peach was a syndicated comic strip [set in an elementary school] created by American cartoonist Mell Lazarus. It ran for 45 years, from February 4, 1957 to September 8, 2002.

… The daily strips often contained only a single panel. The format was “gag-a-day”. The drawing was stylized: the children had tiny bodies and large heads with flounder faces (both eyes on the same side of the nose).

The heads are large, but the bodies are really tiny. True, the heads are larger than adults’ heads, but only by a bit. And the Zippy character is viewed from the front, not the side.

Two samples, with linguistic humor in them:

(#1)

(#2)

#1 turns on two different specialized uses of the verb form whooping — in the formulaic whooping crane and whooping cough. #2 turns on an ambiguity of the verb name ‘give the conventional name for’ vs. ‘assign a name to’.

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:

Ralph understands what symbols are, and even that in this context only symbols that aren’t alphanumerics count, but he hasn’t figured out that obscenicons are a conventional subset of these symbols.

Background on this blog in “The obscenicons vs. the grawlixes” of 8/1/10. Obscenicons are frequently discussed (as well as used) in cartoons; among the many examples on Language Log and this blog are a Zits and a Bizarro in this posting.

In the July 2015 Funny Times (p. 10), a cartoon about cartoon conventions, which I’ll have to describe to you rather than show to you (for reasons I’ll explain).

It shows a man standing by a sidewalk in a park, offering balloons for sale. The placard next to him says

THOUGHT
BALLOONS
75¢

And the balloons are labeled:

NOW WHAT?
WHAT’S FOR DINNER?
LIFE IS STRANGE
LIVE IN THE MOMENT
BE HAPPY!

each supplying a thought.

Funny Times reproduces cartoons and humor writing from other sources, some fairly recent, others going back a few years. The publication is not available on-line. But in principle with some work you could track down the originals; unfortunately, this is often very hard to manage.

For cartoons, the artists are not identified directly, though you can hope to recognize them from their signatures — but some signatures are obscure. As in this case: the signature looks like a scribble, though eventually I recognized it as belonging to veteran New Yorker cartoonist Mick Stevens (who’s appeared on this blog several times).

I couldn’t find an on-line copy of the Thought Balloon Man cartoon, and I wasn’t able to copy it from Funny Times, so for the moment you have to be content with the description above.

But I can offer some Stevens cartoons with thought balloons, and two others on linguistic topics.

With thought balloons: the invention of dental floss; intelligent extraterrestrials who check out the earth and speed away in astonishment; and Roget’s Brontosaurus (with a thought balloon and a linguistic joke):

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

Then two without thought balloons: on invention vs. discovery, and a play (almost wordless) on the formula “Does a bear shit in the woods?”, conveying ‘Yes':

(#4)

(#5)

A query from regular reader Andy Sleeper on the 15th, about conventions in the comics. Andy reported on two cases where he’d seen flanking punctuation used to indicate that what was inside the punctuation was spoken in a language other than English. Andy wondered (a) whether this was an established practice in comics, and (b) whether artists have tried to use other means to solve this problem in their work.

I have to confess that I don’t know the answer to either of these questions, though I’ve spent some time looking around. So now I throw the questions open to the world, hoping that someone will know things I don’t.

Andy’s first example, from a 2010 Doonesbury:

(#1)

Here, speech in Pashto is reported in English (awkward when the Pashto is awkward) inside parentheses ( ).

Andy’s second example, from K. B. Spangler’s A Girl and Her Fed of 6/22/15:

(#2)

Here, speech in Japanese is reported (in English translation) within angle brackets < >. (It’s a long story, with a lot of speech in Japanese.)

Yesterday’s Zippy:

(#1)

This follows on the previous day’s posting on (among other things) manga eyes.

Note the verbing of the adjective surreal in the second panel: surreal it ‘make it surreal’.

There’s a considerable industry of instruction in how to draw manga/anime figures of all kinds; my grand-daughter is into this stuff, so I’ve seen some of the instruction books. From an instructional website, in “Draw manga man hair 4 different ways”, an illustration:

(#2)

The superheroes, with manga eyes and manga hair,  in the last panel of #1 are a nice touch.

It started innocently enough, with a Jack Ziegler cartoon in the January 11th New Yorker:

(#1)

Captain Ahab, identifiable through his peg leg and harpoon,  is apparently looking for his whale in a book store (where he will, no doubt, find copies of Moby-Dick, but no whales). Of course, the cartoon isn’t comprehensible if you don’t know the outlines of the story, but more than that, Ahab and the White Whale have become stock figures in popular culture, and, indeed, a conventional theme of gag cartoons: a cartoon meme.

I then went to search on {Ahab cartoon}, so that I could justify the claim that there was such a meme, and was inundated with examples. In fact, I was inundated with examples from the New Yorker alone, including two more by Jack Ziegler. I stopped collecting them when I had 10 single-panel cartoons plus a New Yorker cover. God only knows how many more there are.

Background, from Wikipedia:

Captain Ahab is a fictional character in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship Pequod. On a previous voyage, the white [sperm] whale Moby Dick bit off Ahab’s leg, leaving him with a prosthesis made out of whalebone. Instead of leading the Pequod on a whaling voyage for profit, Ahab seeks revenge on the whale and casts his spell over the crew-members to enlist them in his fanatical mission. When Moby Dick is finally sighted and hunted down, Ahab’s hate robs him of all caution and denies him revenge. Moby Dick drags Ahab to his death.

… Ahab is firmly established in popular culture by cartoons, comic books, films and plays. Most famously, he provided J. M. Barrie with the model for his Captain Hook character [in Peter Pan], who is obsessed not with a whale but a crocodile.

On to the cartoons. From Ziegler, published 12/6/10: Ahab sings [Irving] Berlin!:

(#2)

And then an unpublished Ziegler available in the magazine’s Cartoon Bank, with Ahab and a bottle of White Whale Brand Grog:

(#3)

One more unpublished cartoon from the Cartoon Bank, by J.P. Rini (new to this blog), with a travel agent who clearly doesn’t distinguish whales and Wales:

(#4)

Then another newcomer to this blog, Sidney Harris, Ahab with the whale mounted on a plaque (published 10/29/90:

(#5)

On to an artist who’s appeared once on this blog before, Glen Le Lievre, with the whale stuck on a subway car filled with Ahab-type whalers (published 3/3/08):

(#6)

Then an artist who’s appeared twice on this blog before, David Borchart, with Ahab raging at the whale, who’s just bitten off his other leg (published 1/24/11):

(#7)

(I note that of the 8 images in this posting where you can tell which of Ahab’s legs was lost in the original encounter with the whale, it’s 5 Ls to 3 Rs; even Ziegler (with 2 Ls to 1 R) is not consistent.)

On to three artists who (like Jack Ziegler) have appeared on this blog often enough to get their own Pages, starting with Danny Shanahan, who appears twice in the current set of cartoons: in a 8/11/14 cartoon with a retired Ahab, with a peg leg shaped like a rocking chair’s leg; and in a 9/20/10 cartoon showing a post-coital Ahab, with his bed-partner complaining accusatorily, “You called me Ishmael!”:

(#8)

(#9)

(Note that Ahab is missing his L leg in #8, his R in #9.)

Ahab does have an unnamed young wife in the book, and the woman in #9 might be her, or she might be a dalliance of the captain’s. In any case, the allusion here is to the first line of the book, the narrator saying “Call me Ishmael”. But in #9, Ahab called the woman Ishmael, presumably in the heat of intercourse, which has led some commenters to suggest that the cartoon depicts an Ahab with some sexual attraction to men — a man like the narrator Ishmael himself, whose relationship (intimate and quite possibly sexual) to the Pequod crewmember Queequeg has been much discussed in the literature on the book.

(Further note: some of the images in this posting are clearly set in the modern world, far removed from the mid-19th-century setting of the book: notably #1, in a modern book store, and #4, in a modern travel agency. But the setting in #9 is plausibly from the era of the book, a fact that adds to the distinctly literary — and New Yorker-esque — character of the cartoon.)

Now a 4/22/13 cartoon from Mick Stevens, showing a disappointed Ahab, who has tracked down a red whale instead of the white one he was hoping for:

(#10)

So much for the crop of cartoons. That leaves the master of New Yorker covers, Bruce McCall, here with a wonderfully silly cover from 6/30/14, showing a breaching sperm whale with advertising on its side for

Cap’n Ahab’s
A “Whale” of a Burger!

(#11)

If you can put ads on the sides of buses, why not on the sides of breaching whales?

(Many breaching whales do back flips. This one is doing a front leap — easier to recognize the species and read the ad.)

It turns out that I have posted Ahab/whale cartoons on this blog before, but only three times; I generally post a cartoon because there’s some linguistic point in it, not just because I found it funny, though I do post occasionally about cartoon memes (as I have just done here). Earlier postings:

“Idioms” (link):  #2 Wrong Hands cartoon by John Atkinson

“Captain Rehab” (link): Speed Bump cartoon by Dave Coverly

“You must remember this” (link): #2 Zach Kanin cartoon in the New Yorker (yes, again the New Yorker)

Oh, yes: Atkinson R leg, the other two L leg.

In the February issue of Funny Times, this cartoon by political cartoonist Taylor Jones:

The third figure in the progression is Bruce Jenner, the fourth Caitlin Jenner.

Some words about Caitlin Jenner, and then a few on the Ascent of Man cartoon meme.

From Wikipedia:

Caitlyn Marie Jenner (born October 28, 1949), formerly known as Bruce Jenner, is an American television personality and retired Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete. Since 2007, she has been appearing on E!’s reality television program Keeping Up with the Kardashians and is currently starring in the reality TV show I Am Cait, which focuses on her gender transition.

Jenner was a college football player for the Graceland Yellowjackets before incurring a knee injury requiring surgery. Coach L. D. Weldon, who had coached Olympic decathlete Jack Parker, convinced Jenner to try the decathlon. After intense training, Jenner won the 1976 Olympics decathlon title at the Montreal Summer Olympics (after a Soviet athlete had won the title in 1972) during the Cold War, gaining fame as “an all-American hero”. Jenner set a third successive world record while winning the Olympics. The winner of the Olympic decathlon is traditionally given the unofficial title of “world’s greatest athlete.” With that stature, Jenner subsequently established a career in television, film, authoring, as a Playgirl cover model, auto racing and business.

On the Ascent cartoon meme, see my 12/15/15 posting on “The evolution of nostalgia”, with 4 Ascent cartoons, an inventory of earlier ones on this blog, and a reference to Juli G. Pausas’s wonderful site on the evolution of man “Hypotheses on human evolution”, which has many many cartoons on the subject (86 at the moment, without the one above).

The May Day Bizarro, in Cartoon Cliché Land:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

This time Piraro has done my work for me, on his blog:

Crawling Through Cliches: As I’ve said before on this blog, I enjoy doing cartoons within the canon of popular cartoon tropes like the desert island, the shrink’s couch, the man crawling through a desert, etc. Here I combine two of them and use another trope: the self-referential cartoon. Self-referential cartoons can be dangerous because if they’re too easy –– a character simply noticing he is in a cartoon without anything more substantial to say about it –– it can elicit a groan. I hope not too many people groaned at this one. I thought it was fun.

It starts with a single-panel gag cartoon in the April 2016 Funny Times:

(#1)

First, things you need to know to get this cartoon. Then, information about cartoonist and graphic novelist Peter Kuper and his other work.

Appreciating the cartoon. First, you need to recognize the two figures in the cartoon, as Captain Ahab (with the wooden leg) and the white whale Moby-Dick (seen here though the flukes of his tail). Ahab and the whale is in fact a cartoon meme, as I pointed out (with lots of New Yorker examples) in a 1/12/16 posting.

Then you need to recognize tha Ahab is taking a photo of the whale on his cellphone (anachronistically, but then this is Cartoon Land, and such oddities have a charm of their own). That is, he is producing a photo, or picture, of Dick, which is to say, a Dick picture, or a Dick pic for short. Dick photo(graph) or Dick (snap)shot would do to refer to such a production, but Dick pic has rhyme going for it.

Then of course there’s the ambiguity in /dIk/: the name Dick OR dick informal ‘penis’ (the source of endless heavy-handed wit). Which brings us to dick pic (in the caption), a conventional compound for a photo of a penis.

Semantic/pragmatic/cultural note: usually, the penis in question belongs to the guy wielding the cellphone — taking a selfie of his junk — and the photo is distributed to a woman in a complex act of boasting, sexual advance, and degradation of the recipient. That is, dick pic is most often used in an incredibly specialized way. But it’s still available in the more general (and less socioculturally hazardous) sense: you can find collections of, for example, playful dick pics, with penises dressed as Santa Claus, cowboys, or whatever. Also,  as a gay enthusiast of penises, I regularly receive and send any number of penis photos (dick pics in the general sense).

The cartoonist. From Wikipedia:

Peter Kuper (born September 22, 1958) is an American alternative cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his autobiographical, political, and social observations.

Besides his contributions to the political anthology World War 3 Illustrated, which he co-founded in 1979 with Seth Tobocman, Kuper is currently best known for taking over Spy vs. Spy for Mad magazine. Kuper has produced numerous graphic novels which have been translated into [many European languages], including award-winning adaptations of Franz Kafka’s Give It Up! and the Metamorphosis.

… Kuper’s work in comics and illustration frequently combines techniques from both disciplines, and often takes the form of wordless comic strips. Kuper remarked on this, “I initially put comics on one side and my illustration in another compartment, but over the years I found that it was difficult to compartmentalize like that. The two have merged together so that they’re really inseparable.”

Note: Kuper does lots of stuff — not only the alternative comics and the graphic novels/memoirs for which he’s celebrated, but also gag cartoons (as above), designing magazine covers, and political cartoons.

Relevant background on this blog:

from 2/24/12, in “Clash of the facenen”: a section on Spy vs. Spy

from 2/28/15, in “Books: cartoon/comic classics”: a section on a book that pairs celebrated cartoonists with appreciations by other cartoonists “doing” them, with Kuper doing Mad magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman

From the NYC Graphic site on 11/13/09 by Christopher Irving on Kuper, highlighting just one of his works:

He went starker in 2003 with yet another adaptation, this one of Franz Kafka’s classic short story The Metamorphosis. Through use of scratchboard and vertigo-inducing panel shapes and sizes, The Metamorphosis catches the dark and foreboding aspects of the story in sequential form.

(#2)

Yesterday’s Bizarro, way meta:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one — see this Page.)

The conceit here is that the characters that appear in comic strips are in fact actors playing roles, so that they can go on strike (among other things). Even more, when the actors are absent, the activities in the strips just go on without them, as if the actors had simply become invisible. Invisible waiter (on strike) takes order from invisible diner (also on strike).

It’s not called Bizarro for nothing.

… was a banner day for cartoons in the New Yorker. Waiting a few minutes to get called in for routine blood tests at the Palo Alo Medical Foundation this morning, I chanced upon this particular issue of the magazine and found five cartoons of interest for this blog (plus some others I enjoyed but had no special interest here); all five were from artists already familiar on this blog.

First I noticed a Bob Eckstein cartoon parodying Hopper’s Nighthawks — which, it turns out, I posted on this blog on 5/30/15. Later, when I checked out the issue on-line, I found the other four. In no particular order:

Zach Kanin on cross-dialect intelligibility.

(#1)

Especially relevant to me since I’ve been watching a lot of British detective tv shows, many with characters speaking distinctly regional (and working-class) varieties of English. (More on this to come.)

Haefeli on same-sex couples.

(#2)

William Haefeli has been posting wryly funny cartoons about gay men for years. Here we see two guys and their daughter, the guys all smiles, either awkwardly at The Question or (I’d prefer to think) delightedly at the kid’s happy request for a retelling of the story as a bedtime ritual.

Kanin’s anachronistic quotative. Yes, another Kanin, this time with the builders of Stonehenge (or something similar) reflecting on the reception of their creation:

(#3)

These prehistoric men are not only speaking modern English — this is set in Cartoonland, after all — but a distinctively recent variety, with quotative (be) like, now the vernacular quotative of choice (compact discussion in a 6/16/13 posting).

Mick Stevens on the pace of evolution. Evolution is a common cartoon topic, usually in some version of the Ascent of Man meme, but sometimes more generally, in an Evolution of Life theme (the Ascent from the Primordial Slime), as here:

(#4)

Here the Evolution of Life meme has been combined with the Traffic Stop meme.

On Language Log on October 5th, Mark Seidenberg, “Cartoonist walks into a language lab”:

[Bob] Mankoff’s involvement in humor research isn’t a joke. He almost completed a Ph.D. in experimental psychology back in the behaviorist era, which is pretty hard core. Before he left the field he co-authored a chapter called “Contingency in behavior theory”, as in contingencies of reinforcement in animal learning. The chapter included this cartoon:

  (#1)

Mankoff is the celebrated New Yorker cartoonist and cartoon editor (and scholar of cartoons); there is now a Mankoff Page on this blog.

#1 is a cartoon about operant conditioning, as here:

Operant conditioning (also called “instrumental conditioning”) is a learning process through which the strength of a behavior is modified by reward or punishment. It is also a procedure that is used to bring about such learning.

… Operant conditioning … was first extensively studied by Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949), who observed the behavior of cats trying to escape from home-made puzzle boxes. A cat could escape from the box by a simple response such as pulling a cord or pushing a pole, but when first constrained the cats took a long time to get out. With repeated trials ineffective responses occurred less frequently and successful responses occurred more frequently, so the cats escaped more and more quickly. Thorndike generalized this finding in his law of effect, which states that behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated. In short, some consequences strengthen behavior and some consequences weaken behavior. By plotting escape time against trial number Thorndike produced the first known animal learning curves through this procedure.

… B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) is often referred to as the father of operant conditioning, and his work is frequently cited in connection with this topic… To implement his empirical approach, Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, or “Skinner Box”, in which subjects such as pigeons and rats were isolated and could be exposed to carefully controlled stimuli. (Wikipedia link)

Operant conditioning has occasionally made it into cartoons, as in this Savage Chickens strip:

  (#2)

And in this cartoon, which appears on a great many psychology sites, but apparently always without attribution (and I’m an idiot at deciphering cartoonists’ signatures):

  (#3)

Then there’s classical conditioning:

Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning) refers to learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. a bell). It also refers to the learning process that results from this pairing, through which the neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response (e.g. salivation) that is usually similar to the one elicited by the potent stimulus. These basic facts, which require many qualifications …, were first studied in detail by Ivan Pavlov through experiments with dogs. Together with operant conditioning, classical conditioning became the foundation of behaviorism, a school of psychology which was dominant in the mid-20th century and is still an important influence on the practice of psychological therapy and the study of animal behavior. Classical conditioning is a basic learning process, and its neural substrates are now beginning to be understood. (Wikipedia link)

Pavlov (standing for classical conditioning) is a well-worn cartoon meme. On this blog:

from 10/11/15, “Pavlov’s cat”: Maria Scrivan cartoon

from 10/20/15, “Going to the dogs”: #2 Dale Coverly cartoon on Pavlov’s dogs

from 10/26/15, “Reubensesque”: #6 Mark Stivers Pavlov cartoon

from 11/15/15, “Title generator, Pavlov”: #2 Tom Gauld Pavlov cartoon

Circulating on Facebook (and many other sites) recently, this penguinocalypse cartoon:

(#1)

I call this a cartoon because it’s a marriage of a quite specific text with a quite specific image, circulated as humor. In fact, I haven’t been able to find this text without this image, or this image without this text (right down to the illegible credit in the lower right-hand corner). Nor have I found any variants of this text, or any variants of this image. #1 is a unique artistic creation, just like the other cartoons I post about here — of the subtype in which the image is taken from some other source (in this case, it’s a photoshopped carnivore penguin) rather than drawn by the creator. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover who the creator was.

As it turns out, this is the third appearance of the cartoon, exactly as above, on this blog. Sadly, I am a forgetful person. Previously:

— on 1/5/17, in “The carniguin”, with the note:

Side benefit: the -ocalypse word penguinocalypse. The usual libfix is –pocalypse; this version is shortened to improve on the somewhat awkward penguinpocalypse (with its /n – p/ sequence).

— on 2/1/18, in “The penguins are coming, the penguins are coming”, with the note:

A bonus is the occurrence of the disaster libfix -(po)calypse in penguinocalypse.

The hybrid creature. The sharp-toothed photoshopped penguin in #1 is a composite of an actual open-mouthed penguin and some other open-mouthed creature with fearsome teeth. Given its tongue and the rest of its mouth, the fearsome creature is clearly not a reptile (in particular, not a snake), but a meat-eating mammal. Well, it might be a leopard seal — that would have some poetry going for it, since leopard seals famously prey on penguins (see my 10/15/19 posting “Sharing your penguin”) — or some kind of large cat, or perhaps a wild dog (for instance, a wolf). Models for comparison to seal and cat (thanks to Kim Darnell for finding these photos):

(#2) A Paul Nicklen photo from the blog posting “A National Geographic Photographer vs. a Leopard Seal”

(#3) From a story in the Daily Mail (UK), “Another tough day on the game reserve! Brilliant pictures capture the moment a lion wakes up from his afternoon nap”

The details of the dentition are clearly cat-like rather than seal-like. And in fact more cat-like than wolf-like. A snarling wolf:

(#4) From the HourlyWolves account on Twitter

(I note that it took me a very long time to find a wolf-mouth photo that didn’t come with a fee for use.)

A closer thing, but I still say cat.

Memes. As it happens, the term meme is a candidate in the competition today for the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Decade (at its meeting in New Orleans). The ADS definition:

meme: a shared cultural item in the form of a phrase, image, or video circulated online, often with humorous, creative alterations

The history of the term is complex — see the Wikipedia page — but there is often a pretty crisp distinction between a specific cultural item that circulates virally and a form or template that circulates in this way. This is the difference between a widely distributed quotation or other linguistic expression and a widely distributed snowclone based on such an expression: between Pink is the new black and the The New Y snowclone (X is the new Y, as exemplified in 60 is the new 40 and hundreds of others).

It is also the difference between a widely distributed specific cartoon — like #1 or the Carl Rose / E.B. White New Yorker cartoon with the caption including “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it” — and cartoon forms like Psychiatrist, Desert Island, Grim Reaper, etc. (many catalogued in my Page on comic conventions).

This is a useful distinction, and I’ve used meme to refer to the templates rather than to the specific cultural objects, but current popular usage uses meme for both. I particular, #1 is generally referred to as a meme. (I have no snappy term that picks out viral specific objects, however, so I’m just pointing out the distinction.)

There are, in fact, templates for humorous images related to the penguinocalypse cartoon. For example, there’s a genre of fearsome hybrid penguin images, like this DeviantArt penguin-whale by oringebob, a hybrid of penguin and orca / killer whale:

(#5)

And a genre of fire-breathing penguin images (check the text in #1), like this one by TheUnseenNobody on Imgur:

(#6)

(It comes with the ad built in, unfortunately.)

In the 9/21 issue of the New Yorker, this Lila Ash cartoon “Evolution of Man”:

(#1) New Yorker description of the cartoon: The evolution of man from a fish to a human throwing their phone in the water, and swimming in to retrieve it.

Yet another variation on the Ascent of Man theme; there have been so many of these on this blog that there’s a Page cataloguing them, here.

Lila Ash is new to this blog. Young — her BFA is from 2011 (Rhode Island School of Design) — feminist, and bicoastal, she’s been offering cartoons regularly to the New Yorker, and has had some hits. Here are two other cartoons of hers, in very contemporary settings, touching on other themes in this blog:

(#2) On facial expressions

(#3) A lovely intrusion of life on the net into the real life, of one world into another

Resting bitch face. From Wikipedia:

Resting bitch face … , or bitchy resting face … , is a facial expression that unintentionally appears as if a person is angry, annoyed, irritated, or contemptuous, particularly when the individual is relaxed, resting or not expressing any particular emotion.

… In a 2013 year-end round-up of newly popular words and phrases [in the New York Times, lexicographer] Grant Barrett asserted that the phrase dates back “at least ten years”

Cookies of the internet (not culinary) sort. From Wikipedia:

An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small piece of data stored on the user’s computer by the web browser while browsing a website. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) or to record the user’s browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited in the past). They can also be used to remember pieces of information that the user previously entered into form fields, such as names, addresses, passwords, and payment card numbers.

… The term “cookie” was coined by web-browser programmer Lou Montulli [in 1994]. It was derived from the term “magic cookie”, which is a packet of data a program receives and sends back unchanged, used by Unix programmers.

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with yet another instance of the Ahab and the Whale cartoon meme:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Moby and Ahab certainly are a troubled couple. Wayno’s title for the strip: “Captain Clingy”.

From Japanese-born New York artist Naruki Kukita, an art-world three-way: hunky men (some from gay porn) displaying their bodies collide with kawaii-cute manga figures to pose in canonical settings of Western high art (especially on mythological and religious themes). I came across this fine example of Kukitart on Pinterest yesterday:

(#1) John the Baptist (2023), amidst the Disneyoid creatures of the forest

From the It’s Nice That (“Inspiring Creativity”) site, “Naruki Kukita mixes classical painting with manga as hope for young people to “create whatever [they] want”: The highly unique paintings of the New York-based artist are incredible visions of the past, present and future of fine art” (a puffery-packed brief interview) by Joey Levenson on 2/23/23:

If you’re a fan of both manga and beautiful men, then New York-based Naruki Kukita is going to be your new favourite artist. In combining the niche intersection of Western romantic painting, manga kawaii art and still-life male pulchritude, Naruki’s work has created waves across social media.

Two more examples of Kukita’s mix of raw carnality, pop-cultural cuteness, and thematic high seriousness:

(#2) Virtual Medusa (2017): Perseus with the beheaded Medusa

(#3) Virtual Sebastien (2017), impaled but impassive