This cartoon has a weird history. I did a version that went to the syndicates, and then cleaned it up a little and it ran, as has been mentioned before, on Tribune Media’s Comicsedge website for up-and-coming talent. A month and a half later, the words appeared nearly verbatim in a ‘Shoe’ cartoon.
Now, I’m not saying that some unscrupulous freelance comics writer was trolling ComicsEdge, writing down gags and then selling them as his own work to big strips. I’m not saying that at all. If you wanted to go say that, well, that’s up to you. If you’re wondering why I’m not accusing the guys who do ‘Shoe’ directly, it’s because I really respect them. I don’t expect them to grill freelance writers to make sure the gags they’re buying are original.
There’s another point, too, that this is a pretty broad gag. It could have been used in the Burns & Allen comedy show on radio or television for all I know. It’s got the look and the feel of something that anyone could have come up with.
ON THE OTHER HAND… another one of my ‘Because It’s There’ cartoons started off “You rode your mountain board off the roof? What were you thinking?”… And a short time after the club soda gag ran on ‘Shoe’ they ran a gag that started “You rode your skateboard off the roof? What were you thinking?” The proximity and wording makes me suspicious, even though the punchlines didn’t match.
Not that there’s anything to be done, of course. The newspapers and interwebs are FULL of cartoons, and have been for years and years. Multiply any cartoon by the number of times it runs in a year (365 for syndicated strips like The Buckets), then multiply that by the number of cartoons you read, and then multiply again for all the hundreds of cartoons you’ve never seen and never even heard of and you get a number of jokes written and drawn over the past ten decades that is truly (not euphemistically) awesome and staggering to the mind. And more being done every day. Like this one, that rehashes a gag I did on ComicsEdge and then ran in ‘Shoe’ and has been resurrected here on Hubriscomics.
So, if you once saw this gag on M*A*S*H or Leave It To Beaver or The Banana Splits, well… welcome it back to life for a moment. Mark it down. It’ll probably turn up somewhere else in a month or so. Just hope it’s not in ‘Shoe’.
