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Showing posts from June, 2024

271. The One With the Negroni Shirt

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My wife Roxanne and I literally stumbled into this comic idea some time ago, while involved in one of our favorite hobbies: sipping mixed booze. One of the owners of the cocktail bar had a Negroni shirt and I, being a Negroni fan, complimented him for it. He said it’s great, but you "have to be careful with the outerwear". That's all he said, he let our minds wander to the punchline. We immediately realized this would make a great comic. We asked for permission, and here it is!  The word "negro" is special to me because for half my life the word was unencumbered. It just means "black" in Spanish. When I came to the United States I didn't have the full respect of the word and other tainted words. I was called non-white for the first time in my life! I was so confused.  I hope you find this comic as inoffensive and silly as it’s intended to be! Extra Panel:  

270. Bubble Trouble

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I find the language of comics fascinating. In Venezuela, while everybody in the United States was reading Garfield or The Far Side, we had Condorito from Chile. It's about, a ... I'm guessing a small anthropoid condor?  Every time there was a punchline, the characters did a Face Fault  (warning, that’s a TV Tropes link, so there goes your afternoon). It came with the onomatopoeian caption: PLOP. Here’s an example: In that comic, the bird-like character asks -“what are you doing” , the dumb looking guy says “looking at a map of Italy, why do you think it’s shaped like a boot?” And the small Condor says the punchline “Because all the people wouldn’t fit in a shoe” . Solid. Faint-worthy. Just for the purists out there, that is not Condorito, it’s Cone, the nephew of Condorito. Cone is to Condorito as Scrappy-Do is to Scooby. Ok, enough Condorito lore-dumping. I’ve seen the PLOP system here and there (like in this recent comic from the brilliant Marko Rassina,  Nerd and Jock ).