Four color madness

Way too many silent penultimate panels to count today. (Thanks again to Ugliness Man for finding a lot of these.)

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau
Jump Start by Robb Armstrong
Momma by Mell Lazarus
Monty by Jim Meddick
Prickly City by Scott Stantis
Sally Forth by Francesco Marciuliano and Craig Macintosh
Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey

That's a Sunday record. For those of you scoring at home, the daily stats and the Sunday stats should be kept separate. With the longer form, a Sunday strip's rhythm is a little different. But, then again, there has been a trend in recent years to do short Sunday strips--three or four panels, (or even worse, a single panel.) For example, today's Foxtrot and Prickly City.




The only difference between these and a daily strip is the color--and with a lot of newspapers now printing color dailies, that means there is no difference at all. Maybe we shouldn't keep the Sunday and daily counts separate here. It will be on the agenda at the next rules committee meeting.

But, I should take a moment to be sincere here. Please, dear cartoonists, please keep Sundays special.

Now that that's done with, let me go back to being a jerk. Here's the script of today's Prickly City--
Coyote-Thing: 21 years ago, New Coke was introduced. So where's my present?
Girl-Shaped Ink Blot Thing: Same place New Coke is.

Huh?
This is called forcing a joke.
I need to make a joke, where should I start? New Coke was a dumb idea. There could be a joke there. And New Coke happened twenty one years ago. If I'm ever going to do a joke about New Coke, I need to do it now. So, let's have the coyote mention this trivia fact to the girl and then she can say something dismissive. That's funny! But how do I set up the girl's dismissive remark? Well, hmmm, maybe the coyote can... I don't know....well he's silly and naive... I got it! He can think he deserves a present because New Coke happened two decades ago! Yes! At this point, if you're Scott Stantis, it's time to slap yourself on the head, crumple your notes and just pull something out of your Hillary Clinton file. The New Coke joke is just not going to happen.

Unless, wait... maybe I just discovered the true genius of Stantis! Just as New Coke was an idea that should have been abandoned, so is today's comic strip! It's a meta-joke of mimeticism. It's meta-mimetic maniacal brilliance!