Ons and offs
We'll call it three today:
Cow and Boy by Mark Leiknes
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau
Red and Rover by Brian Basset
Overboard and Foxtrot are off.
Either the second or third panel could be left out, but the passing time is essential to the gag. For what it's worth.
Here, the absence of the second cookie in the penultimate panel is necessary. This whole what-if-the-Foxtrot-kids-were-cookies thing has got to end. I have a feeling this is what made Bill Amend decide to retire as a daily cartoonist. He looked up from his drawing board one morning and realized, holy crap, I've done a week's worth of gags about cookies.
Doonesbury counts, but I think this is a very necessary SPP.
If you look through the archives here it turns out that when Trudeau uses an SPP, it is most often a dramatic one. The SPP is necessary here for the tone to change as well as it does from dramatic to comic.
posted by Matt Gill at 8:02 PM
3 Comments:
Red's picture, taken out of context like that, freaks the heck out of me.
I hadn't realized yet that Bill Amend announced his retirement. With that information, I'm wondering whether the cookie gag was just a way to get out of drawing a week's worth of comics through his last handful of strips. It certainly has been exhausting to see the exact same panel on the comics page day after day, kind of like Mallard Fillmore. I can't wait to see what other half-assed strips he has in store for the rest of the month.
I saw one in Friday's Curtis too- the gag may have needed to show pause, but the last panel itself was the reveal so taking out the SPP would have made it sharper...
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