Shut out

It's a rare day, indeed. No silent penultimate panels to be found.

Momma comes close. Close enough that on some other day I might have counted it. But the silent panel is a transition panel rather than an entirely useless pause before the punch line. Still, it is wasted space, and not funny.


The 1959 Peanuts reprint also comes close, but Snoopy's pathetic look is necessary to the joke.

So, it's a shut-out. I feel strange and incomplete.

Even though I'm not quite sure what the hell he is talking about, Bruce Tinsley does something interesting mechanically in today's Mallard Fillmore:

A seamless transition from the mechanical, jagged tailed word balloon of the television to a standard word balloon of a speaking character. I don't know if I've ever seen something done like this before.

Now, I'm assuming this did not come out of a Chris Ware-like desire to experiment with the form and grammar of comics, but instead just happened out of rant-addled clumsiness. Like the unexpected poetry sometimes found in mis-translated electronics instructions, it's art by sheer dumb luck.