Friday, November 6, 2009

Halloween Redux

Bizarro is brought to you today by Belated Holidays.

Since I post my cartoons about a week after they appear, these cartoons from Halloween weekend seem conspicuously tardy. So just pretend you're reading them a week ago and you're putting the finishing touches on your Shrek costume in today's blog.

I love love love the Sleepy Hollow gag and wish I'd written it. But, alas, it came from my good friend Richard Cabeza (funniest spanglish name ever). He can be a real genius sometimes, and at this very moment his wife is expecting a baby or some reasonable facsimile. Thanks for the gag, Dick, and good luck to all involved with that baby business.


The Frankenstein gag is okay, I guess. I'm not crazy about it, but it's a good picture and has a monster theme. I've done some better Frankenstein gags in the past, which if I had any kind of reasonable filing system I'd be able to show you a few now. I hate myself sometimes.

In case you didn't know, Sleepy Hollow is a real town beside the Hudson River just north of New York City. Washington Irving wrote a lot about New York City and the surrounding areas, he popularized usage of the term "Knickerbocker" for New Yorkers and is also responsible for the myths about Manhattan being bought from the Indians for twenty-something dollars and a handful of trinkets, as well as the one about Christopher Columbus trying to prove the world was round. Both appeared in Washington's works of fiction but eventually were incorporated into elementary school history classes.

Scary.

3 comments:

ojeano said...

I like the Frankenstein's Monster's foot asleep joke a lot.

In other news: ...Richard Cabeza... ha ha ha ha...

ebilucy said...

Washington Irving also is the person most responsible for reviving the holiday of Christmas. In his Knickerbocker stories, he told how the old-timers would celebrate the holiday, with Santa Claus, etc. And it became a fad, then a tradition. Before this, December 25th was just another religious holiday, not the major blowout it is now.

Anonymous said...

I had no idea Washington Irving had such an impact on our culture! Thanks for the lesson.