Doc Ock Dan

Well, it’s Friday the end of the normal work week. I’ll be going into work this weekend, partly to front load next week’s work week, so I can take off a day earlier next weekend. The reason that I gave my boss though, was that I need to come in, in order to get my work done in time for our looming deadlines. All this is just preamble, because from a blogging point of view, Friday’s blog is always the hardest one to write. Come Saturday, I’ll have done something interesting enough to expound about, but on Friday night, I’m usually spent. So it is with some glee that I found two blog worthy items.

The first item I found was the results from the New Yorker’s Cartoon Bureau People Choices. For year’s, I’ve enjoyed the New Yorker’s cartoons. For a long time to the exclusion of the rest of the magazine. As the link implies this is a collection of reader’s favorites. While most New Yorker cartoons are good, these are great cartoons. Here is a list of my favorites from this collection: 

• A man holding a stick is watching his dog. The cartoon bubble shows the dog thinking, “It’s always ‘Good Dog’ never ‘Great Dog’.”
• A bald eagle sits in its nest and addresses the eaglet there, “The candy’s for after dinner.” Under one of the eagle’s claws is a dead rabbit. At the opposite end of the nest is an Easter basket.
• Parents with their small children are seen flocking to a corner store, called Child Crap. Maybe this one is too visual to convey only in words?
• Saint Peter is standing at the pearly gates, speaking into his celestial cell, “You’re confirmed for Sunday at 5:30 AM in your bed, sound asleep.”
• A man stands in front of a kitchen with the sink and the every horizontal surface covered with dirty dishes. He says, “I cooked us a lovely dinner for two. You could at least do the dishes!” I routinely do most of the cooking and the dishes. When Anne occasionally cooks, she usually leaves our kitchen looking a lot like the one in the cartoon.
• A mother and daughter are dining at a white clothed table. The mother tells the daughter, “It’s broccoli, dear.” The daughter replies, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” This cartoon must be one of Bub’s favorites too, because I’ve heard her utter the punchline several times.

I felt I needed a cartoon as graphic to go with post about cartoons. Searching my photo archives I found the above Photoshop photograph. Dan made it in 2004. It shows his face superimposed upon the cyborg body of Doc Ock, a Spiderman villain. Cartoons, comic books, movies about comic books, it was close enough.