Football Funnies

Every year, there's the typical response and advertisement to a media frenzy that is the Super Bowl, or the Football Finals.

And every year, I always mean to post some relevant Football comics.

And every year, I forget.

This time, I decided to just post what I had, and let the comics see the light of day once again.  Chances are, their relevance will remain timely.


One suspects that if women started getting interested in Football (and such unicorns are more common than you think) the resulting vocalized opinion from Male fans would be vitriolic hatred aimed at them for being "fake fans".

In any case, my general interest in Football that's not Manga-related can be summarized in this comic below:

Breaking the Gummi Wall

There's a sugary place in Seatle that's renowned for being the second-largest depository of chewing gum stuck to its wall.  Late last year, it was forced to clean up the colorfully disgusting surface due to health issues.  The concern wasn't the amount of sugar available, but more along hygenie issues.  While it sounds like the outlandish premise to a classic Simpsons episode, it's something that actually happened.

I'm only bringing this news up because it's tangentially related to the title heading, and figured it was too bizarre to pass up on search results.

By all rights, The Gummi Bears shouldn't have been as good as they turned out to be - a barely fleshed-out premise, influenced by a punny take on a candy, using character designs from the ruined concepts of The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain which is currently being reconsidered for a revival, preferably done right).  For all of Lloyd Alexander's complaints about how the movie bastardized his work, the cartoon series' success skewed closer to his source material, and paid more attention to the more competent female role.  (A welcome inversion of the Trinity Syndrome, where the male lead's self-esteem is bolstered in contrast to the woman's ability)

However, what worked so well for the television screen was drastically neutered for the comics page.  Since the only purpose for acquiring a slot on the funnies (other than taking up valuable advertising space) was to retain copyright and produce public awareness of their property, it shouldn't have been surprising that such a fondly remembered series should be reduced to pandering to a childish audience.  Yet it still remains a surprise.

There aren't very many available resources for finding samples of Gummi Bear comics, since the few newspapers that carried them didn't keep them for very long.  As with most licensed properties, they were only kept around long enough to serve their purpose.  A cursuory survey of their strips show hardly any variance in their formula - being little more than one-off jokes set in a widescreen format that could've been put to better use, usually limited to just two characters, and with barely any dialogue.  Comics broken up into panels were even rarer, and just as unmemorable.

Yet there were a few instances of the comic being aware of their surroundings, as if the cartoonist was straining against the limitations of the form, and wanted to rail against the corporate structure bearing against them.  Showcasing a desire to expand the conventions beyond the borders of a daily strip, and maybe move onto long-term storytelling.

Or possibly, I'm projecting, and reading too much into what's basically just another flawed comic strip.

Filling our Hunger Holes

In an interesting moment of synchronicity, both of today's Doonesbury and For Better or for Worse reruns had the same theme as the Thanksgiving Famine tribute that occurred on November 28, 1985.  However, looking closely, there's a significant difference - the Doonesbury one is one year earlier than the FbofW one.

After doing some further research, it seems that the Africa tribute was such a hit that cartoonists decided to do it again for next year.  However, that's where this tradition ended.

This is part of a "lost" series of Doonesbury strips where Honey busted Duke out of jail.  Its a shame they weren't collected, since as with anything involving Duke, they're pretty funny.

As before, I'll start off with the better known strips, and save the more cringe-worthy ones at the end.

I'm aware that I posted this BC strip last time, but that's just to give some setup for the next one:

And here's the strip that showed up a year later:


When you consider the cast of Shoe being made up of birds (who are sometimes hunted for sport by rifle-toting dogs), you have to either equate the characters as being feathered humans or resorting to
cannibalism.  Either way, madness awaits for those trying to rationalize their customs.

Last time, I posited the possibility that Bill Watterson was dismayed that he wasn't able to contribute to the Famine last year, so he made up for it this year.  Here's an interesting editorial change to one of the balloons of this strip from the Edmonton Journal.

There are plenty of unknown Canadian comics that have very little commercial appeal outside its home country, and Ben Wick's Outcasts is among them.  A lot of the jokes were political, the drawings were of lower quality than Quentin Blake's and much of the humour was centered between an elderly couple with deep jowls that made them look like bulldogs.  Oftentimes while making a particularly lousy joke, one or the other seniors would reply in raucous laughter.  It's dubious an Outcasts collection would even manage to find an audience today.


Some strips went the extra mile by having a prelude strip the day before, or a concluding strip the day after.




In any other context, this Broom Hilda strip would make it seem like the witch was going from house-to-house to extort random people out of their turkey dinners.  It would be totally in-character for her to do something like that.

This isn't a continuation of the last strip - the above was from last year, and the strip below showed a year later.

Some comic strip jerks were less cordial about helping the less fortunate, and tended to miss the point.




Other comics were a little more preachy in their message.










It's hard to tell, but I think Arnold's got the whole turkey stuck in his throat in the last panel.

Even licensed comics weren't safe from this:

The worst part about Looney Tunes newspaper comics is how much of Bugs Bunny's wisecracks come less from his mental dexterity manipulation of his enemies, and more from lucking his way out of circumstances.

Yes, there was a Mr. Men (and little Miss) comic strip.  Should you be surprised at this point?

This Ripley's Believe it or Not! actually appeared a day earlier, but I'm posting it here for relevance.

I actually passed this one several times over, since it didn't have the title characters, it dealt with robots and didn't have a central Thanksgiving theme. That was until I noticed that the robot was actually giving excess abundance of energy over to a disheveled deprived robot.  Some tributes aren't so easy to recognize upon first sight.


As with last year, the serious serials handled their reality issue with as much subtlety as space demanded.






Others just had the tagline of "Hands Across America" in their strips.




As warned, here's the worst saved for last.  In addition, here's some more comics I found that I missed last year.
 





And now that you've made it to the end, surely you know the meaning of suffering too.