New Year’s Humilatin’ Eve

Top 5 foods that do NOT soak up alcohol:

5.  Celery

4.  Tick-tacks

3.  Fingernails.

2.  Air

1.  More champagne

Be safe tonight.

Stay home and marvel at Dick Clark’s speech therapy progress.

Hammy Saves

Hammy is my hero and I shall not want.
He maketh me stop and smell the Twinkies, he leadeth me to pick out squid shapes in the clouds.
Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of  suburbia,  I will fear no angst, for Hammy art with me, thy thumbs and thy fuzzy milk duds they comfort me.
Hammy preparest a feast of Macaroni and Cheese dust in the presence of mine critics, thou filllest my head with silliness; my smile runneth wide.
Surely a toasty-cozy warm buzz will follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the hug of Hammy for ever.

And ever.

Amen.

Kicking Squid Butt

I think today’s title is funnier than today’s comic.

It happens.

Erinie Bushmiller Gets All the Girls

Ernie Bushmiller took over the comic strip Fritzi Ritz in 1925.  Eventually the strip was renamed Nancy in 1938.  Bushmiller produced the strip until his death in 1982.  Nancy continues today as a “legacy strip”  written and drawn by the talented Guy Gilchrist (thus the 50 years ahead gag in today’s cartoon).

Nancy, while never quite achieving comedy combustion, was (under Bushmiller) the purest example of comic form over comic function.  It’s form was beautiful, spare and mathematically precise.

Here’s what comic guru and historian Scott McCloud said about Bushmiller:

Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy is a landmark achievement: A comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the “gag-strip”; a sense of humor so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile. Nancy is Plato’s playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn’t draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew the tree, the house, the car. Much has been made of the “three rocks.” Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be “some rocks.” Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate “some rocks” but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of “some rocks.” A Nancy panel is an irreduceable concept, an atom, and the comic strip is a molecule.

Three rocks.  Not two.  Not four.

Three rocks.

Mary “Boom-Boom” Worth

Mary Worth vs. Joan Holloway?  Seriously?

Really not much of a contest.

One is more woman than any man can handle and the other is a fictional TV character.

 

Cartoonist School Confessions

I have no idea what I’m wearing in this.   Not sure why T dressed me up in shorts and what looks like an Old Navy shirt from 1997.  I do wear Chucks, but not high-tops.   I did wear red high-top Chucks 20 years ago.

Which might have been the last time T and I saw each other.

I’ll send him a recent photo.

Or not.

Hammy’s Hugging Santa Claus

Merry Christmas from everyone at Over the Hedge:

Myself, T Lewis (no period, don’t ask me why), the entire Latvian child labor force (God bless their tiny hands, God bless them everyone one), our crack Thailand research team (where internet search costs are lower) and of course, all the little people who make Over the Hedge possible (you know who you are and if you don’t, ask the little person next to you).

And a Happy New Year!*

*except in Latvia where all new years are really just okay.

12 Daze of Christmas: A Partridge Can Finally Flee!

Well…  that killed two weeks.

Over the Hedge:  Feeding the beast since 1995.

12 Daze of Hedgemas: 11 Snakes A-Griping

Top 5 Toughest Hammy Hugs:

5.  Snakes

4.  Fleas

3.  Amoebas

2.  Space-time

1.  Schrodinger’s cat

12 Daze of Hedgemas: 10 Boars A-Bleeping

We’re limping to the end here.

In retrospect we should have featured a different Partridge every day.  We’ve given Mr. Cassidy more attention then he’s had in years.

C-list celebrities* and fish tend to smell after three days.

(*I count myself as somewhere between N-list and Q-list).