Separated at Mirth: Bears Repeating (a Gag)!

What could a "Smarter Than the Average Bear" possibly have in common with a "Bear of Very Little Brain"?  

Not much, I'll grant you, but they DO have a Mirth Separation over Honey (or "Hunny") and the not-so-safe transport of same!  

Consider the "sidekick's delight" on the covers of YOGI BEAR # 14 (Gold Key Comics, Cover Date: October, 1963)...

...And WINNIE-THE-POOH #21 (Whitman Comics, Cover Date: October, 1980 - more-or-less 17 years apart)!  

When you set them in reverse chronological order, they're even WALKING TOWARD one another! 

And with all four characters in the correct proportions to one another!  Tallest to shortest: Yogi, Pooh, Boo Boo (almost neck-and-neck), and Piglet!  

Ya think one bear might tip off the other?  You know like the "Brotherhood of Fellow Bears", or something like that?  ..."Code of the Bears", if you will?  

Or maybe Yogi and Pooh are too taken with visions of Honey (or "Hunny") to notice... and Boo Boo and Piglet will just wink at each other!  

The branch-bearing bears might even obliviously walk into each other, and ask directions back to Jellystone Park and/or the Hundred-Acre Wood.  After all, ONE OF THEM would be seriously out of place.  ...Probably lost because they didn't heed their perpetually-worrying sidekicks!  

Well, regardless of WHO's headed WHERE, we have YOGI BEAR # 14 and WINNIE-THE-POOH #21 simultaneously "together" while "SEPARATED" AT MIRTH! 

The Month of AAUGH-ust!

 August, as it turned out, was a "Month of Many Things"!  

Some of them really bad... more of them good... all of them draining and depleting!  

Outside of working on a story for Fantagraphics at the beginning of AAUGH-ust, and just completing another one at the end, virtually none of my normal activities - personal communications, indexing for GCD, comics reading and "The Great Comics Organization and Storage Retirement Project"... and, yes, even this Blog - received ANY of my attentions during this period!  

It's finally time to rectify this, and begin getting things back on track! 

So, here I am with an admittedly less than adequate explanation for our lengthy absence, and hope you're all still around and ready to rejoin me, as we try to make this insane world a better place... one Blog post at a time!  

Together let's begin turning AAUGH-ust into YEP-tember!  

Panels You Never Expected to See: "Explosion"!

You don't REALLY want me to say anything about this isolated panel from DAISY AND DONALD # 12 (Gold Key Comics, Cover Date: September,1975), do you?  

NAW, didn't think you did!  

Don't blame me, I'm only a humble Blogger!  

Instead, let's remember our writer / artist Bob Gregory and characters in happier times - like in the NEXT ISSUE! 

Ah, that's MUCH BETTER!  

Adventures in Comic-Boxing: Never Bring a Pickax to a Gunfight...Unless...

The cover of GHOSTS #59 (DC Comics, Cover Date: December, 1977) would seem to bear out the old (shot-in-the) "chest"-nut that says "Never Bring a Knife (or a Pickax) to a Gunfight!"

UNLESS it's a pickax of the "Legendary Super" variety.  

...Then again... 

...Maybe it's just better to wait for a GHOST to come along and save you!

I'd say MUCH BETTER! 

And the MORE GHOSTS, the merrier! 

Separated at Mirth: Of Cats, Mice, and Brooms!

Today's "Mirth Separation" features FELIX THE CAT # 14 (Dell Comics, Cover Date: April-May, 1950)...

...And TOM AND JERRY # 220 (Gold Key Comics, Cover Date: August, 1964)

Both Felix and Tom are at the ready before a mousehole with a swatting broom, unaware that Skidoo the Mouse and Jerry and Tuffy (respectively) are hiding in the very instrument each cat wields as a weapon!  

Further, each cover has a red background...

...And, if you mash them together like this, they could be standing on both sides of the same wall (or, more likely, AROUND A CORNER from one another), covering an "entrance to" and an "exit from" the very same mousehole!   

If you'd care to delve deeper (...and WHO among you would NOT?), you could also note the different esthetics on display in service to the exact same gag!  

The well-worn broom wielded by Felix, and Skidoo's rough-hewn mousehole suggest the more hardscrabble times as the 1940s segued into the 1950s.

In contrast, Tom's "new broom" and Jerry and Tuffy's neat and esthetically-pleasing mousehole (...that is, if it's at all possible for a mousehole to be "esthetically-pleasing") - not to mention that the "Tom and Jerry wall and floor" look as if they've been FRESHLY PAINTED vs. Felix's shabbier background - suggest the softer and more prosperous 1960s!

And I get a little tickle from imagining Jerry and Tuffy and Skidoo as "mousehole neighbors"...

...Sharing a medicine cabinet, as Chuck McCann and Bill Fiore did in the unforgettable "Right Guard Deodorant" commercials!  

Finally, can't you just see Tom and Felix swatting each other, as the mice jump to safety?! 

TOM AND JERRY cover is by Harvey Eisenberg.  FELIX THE CAT cover is by Otto Messmer. 

There you have TOM AND JERRY # 220 and FELIX THE CAT # 14, brooms, mouseholes, and suckered cats... SEPARATED AT MIRTH!  

Happy Fourth, 2022!

Sometimes it's difficult to believe that we're even STILL AROUND, as both a people and as a nation, given that so much bad has happened in this unpleasantly  disappointing 21st Century.  ...(Sigh! I had such hopes!) 

But, for the past 22 years, it feels like this country - and much of the world, for that matter - is run by STOOGES!  

Thus, our rather suitable image for this post...

Happy Fourth! ...I'm betting MOE is responsible for the bandage on Larry's head! 

Questions You Never Asked: If I Were Writing Superman, What Would I Do Here?

Okay, let's see how closely you've followed my own comics writing/translation/dialoguing work of recent years...

If I were writing the following panel of SUPERMAN, what would I change?  

Send your answers in the form of comments, please!