Reading the Comics, September 16, 2017: Wait, Are Elviney and Miss Prunelly The Same Character Week

It was an ordinary enough week when I realized I wasn’t sure about the name of the schoolmarm in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. So I looked it up on Comics Kingdom’s official cast page for John Rose’s comic strip. And then I realized something about the Smiths’ next-door neighbor Elviney and Jughaid’s teacher Miss Prunelly:

Excerpt from the cast page of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Among the many mysteries besides that apparently they’re the same character and I never noticed this before? Why does Spark Plug, the horse Google owns that’s appeared like three times this millennium and been the source of no punch lines since Truman was President, get listed ahead of Elviney and Miss Prunelly who, whatever else you can say about them, appear pretty much every week?

Are … are they the same character, just wearing different glasses? I’ve been reading this comic strip for like forty years and I’ve never noticed this before. I’ve also never heard any of you all joking about this, by the way, so I stand by my argument that if they’re prominent enough then, yes, glasses could be an adequate disguise for Superman. Anyway, I’m startled. (Are they sisters? Cousins? But wouldn’t that make mention on the cast page? There are missing pieces here.)

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic In A Minute feature for the 10th sneaks in here yet again with a magic trick based in arithmetic. Here, they use what’s got to be some Magic Square-based technology for a card trick. This probably could be put to use with other arrangements of numbers, but cards have the advantage of being stuff a magician is likely to have around and that are expected to do something weird.

Susan Camilleri Konair’s Six Chix for the 13th of September, 2017. It’s a small artistic touch, but I do appreciate that the kid is shown with a cell phone and it’s not any part of the joke that having computing devices is somehow wrong or that being on the Internet is somehow weird or awry.

Susan Camilleri Konair’s Six Chix for the 13th name-drops mathematics as the homework likely to be impossible doing. I think this is the first time Konair’s turned up in a Reading The Comics survey.

Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 13th is an Albert Einstein Needing Help panel. It’s got your blackboard full of symbols, not one of which is the famous E = mc² equation. But given the setup it couldn’t feature that equation, not and be a correct joke.

John Rose’s Barney Google for the 14th of September, 2017. I admire Miss Prunelly’s commitment to ongoing professional development that she hasn’t run out of shocked or disapproving faces after all these years in a gag-a-day strip.

John Rose’s Barney Google for the 14th does a little more work than necessary for its subtraction-explained-with-candy joke. I non-sarcastically appreciate Rose’s dodging the obvious joke in favor of a guy-is-stupid joke.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 14th is a kind of lying-with-statistics joke. That’s as much as it needs to be. Still, thought always should go into exactly how one presents data, especially visually. There are connotations to things. Just inverting an axis is dangerous stuff, though. The convention of matching an increase in number to moving up on the graph is so ingrained that it should be avoided only for enormous cause.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 14th of September, 2017. It’s important the patient not panic thinking about how he’s completely flat under the blanket there.

This joke also seems conceptually close, to me, to the jokes about the strangeness of how a “negative” medical test is so often the good news.

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 15th is not about solitaire. But “solving” a game by simulating many gameplays and drawing strategic advice from that is a classic numerical mathematics trick. Whether a game is fun once it’s been solved so is up to you. And often in actual play, for a game with many options at each step, it’s impossible without a computer to know the best possible move. You could use simulations like this to develop general guidelines, and a couple rules that often pan out.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 16th qualifies as the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for this week. I’m glad to have got one in.

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