NANCY SAMEDI*

*Legally distinct from Sluggo Saturday

09/23/1944

04/19/1966

Thought you could get away with repeating the same dialogue 22 years later??? Well guess what, Ernie Bushmiller… you’re fucking BUSTED.

I tinkered with my About page and reverted it back to its original title of Meta. My goal was to simplify things and provide better clarity. The site now has an 88×31 button for the first time:

I watched the newly-restored Disney short Mickey’s Kangaroo and was shocked to hear Pluto talking. Well, technically, he looks directly at the viewer in a somewhat unnerving way and seemingly transmits his thoughts to us telepathically, but still. It’s a surprisingly gruff voice. I can see why they immediately abandoned this and had him keep his thoughts to himself for the next 90 years.

I remembered hearing Snoopy talk in a Peanuts cartoon once where they go in the opposite direction and give him a slightly nebbish young guy voice so I went to look that up, found this video, and was equally shocked to see a fleeting glimpse of Lucy and Linus Van Pelt’s parents. Behold:

Putting my AI-generated art on this page because it feels cringe and shameful to put it on social media. I had started it last year but the fad died out and I ran out of ideas so it was scrapped. I might add more later but Bing seems to be locking it down tight now.

podcasts I’ve enjoyed lately

• Uhh Yeah Dude: Episode 993 – Seth tearing into Little Leaguers had me dying. Nearly 1000 episodes and they’re still in top form.
• Where We Parked episode 6: The Castle Drawbridge – The concept of Disneyland is pretty weird if you think about it
• E1: Pixar’s Sodas – Hands down the greatest animated feature of the year

On the subject of podcasts, best wishes to Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House.

9/1/2023

It’s been well-documented that the Lockhorns are millennials. Even though this is word salad (can one doomscroll TikTok?) I appreciate that this is one of the few legacy strips making an effort to keep its non-aging characters continually updated, as opposed to… whatever was happening in Guy Gilchrist’s Nancy:

9/1/2017

8/2/2015

Bruce Tinsley Watch

Decided to check in on Mallard Fillmore cartoonist Bruce Tinsley. Last time I checked, about three months ago, his seldom-used Twitter account had been hacked by a Bitcoin spammer. Well, now the account has been suspended:

Tinsley’s in his 60s and presumably in ill health, he shouldn’t have to be dealing with this shit. Why isn’t King Features Syndicate doing anything about this?

12/10/2007

As mentioned before, I’ve been on a quest to watch all 28 Blondie movies. I’ve made a page to put all my reviews so they’re all in one place. Also, I can include images. Currently I just have 15 more movies to go.

My thoughts on the new Facebook app “Threads”

Blondie Watch

Something I came across when looking through early Blondie strips that I found kind of amusing is this short-lived feature called the Husbands’ Back Fence Club where readers were invited to send in their complaints about their spouses. Just a few months after Blondie and Dagwood’s big wedding and already the comic has pivoted to Battle of the Sexes, ball-and-chain type stuff. Here’s the first two strips in full:

06/24/1933

07/01/1933

And the rest of them, cropped:

07/08/1933

07/15/1933

07/22/1933

08/05/1933

I’m gonna keep posting on Twitter until I can’t, which by the looks of things might be sooner rather than later. Who knows how long Bluesky will last, but I’m on there now as well. As always, check out this page for all the places I’m at on the computer.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first post I made here on rubbercat.net. I was a kid back then and it’s a little crazy to think that I’ve had this website for more than half my life. I’ve never mentioned this before, but the main impetus for creating it was that I’d been using the name Rubber Cat Productions in my zine and I feared all the URLS would be taken by the time I became an adult, so in addition to having a creative outlet I’d have some future insurance against that. Who knew they would just add new TLDs? As the internet continues to collapse, it is nice to have a space that I can control, free of the whims of social media and pressures of capital. Thank you for reading.

Spending most of my free time playing the new Zelda game, which has been an incredible experience. I love exploring caves and the underground depths. I am keeping a diary of my progress on my game blog.

Blondie Watch

Before she married Dagwood Bumstead, Blondie’s name was Blondie Boopadoop. That’s what Wikipedia says, that’s what King Features Syndicate says, that’s what the Library of Congress says. But… was it? Out of curiosity, I looked into it, and while “Boopadoop” had been used in official promotional material dating back to 1930, I have yet to find it used in an actual comic strip. A few caveats: my search was by no means exhaustive (it would be nice to have the collection IDW put out) the OCR might have missed something, or maybe there are some gaps in the archive. I would assume “Boopadoop” came from creator Chic Young, or at least had his approval, but it’s odd that he apparently never put it into the strip, so while it’s offical enough, it’s not 100% Comic Strip Canon. Not that the strip was necessarily super-strict about continuity, mind you, just ask the Woodleys’ missing children.

Below are some of my findings; it’s interesting that some of the comic strip’s storylines would also play out in the letters section.

Belleville Daily News Democrat, August 18, 1930

Santa Fe New Mexican, August 23, 1930

Lebanon Daily News, October 8, 1930

The Windsor Star, March 12, 1932

Tampa Bay Times, December 20, 1942

Steel #1 (1977), via 13th Dimension

Maybe things were different in 1977, but in most Batman stuff I’ve read or seen it’s implied but never outright stated that the commish knows a secret identity or two, so I laughed at how blunt this answer is.