Each week Comic Strip Master Command sends out some comics that mention mathematics, but that aren’t substantial enough to write miniature essays about. This past week, too. Here are the comics that just mention mathematics. You may like them; there’s just not more to explain is all.
Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 25th is a bunch of cafeteria lunch jokes. Geometry and wordplay about three square meals a day comes up.
Jeffrey Caulfield and Brian Ponshock’s Yaffle for the 26th has a bunch of jokes about representing two, as part of a “tattwo parlor”. I’m not sure how to categorize this. Wordplay, I suppose.
Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug for the 27th uses “quantum entanglement equations” to represent deep thought on a complicated subject. Calculations are usually good for this.
Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper rerun for the 27th uses a blackboard of mathematics — geometry-related formulas — to stand in for all classwork. This strip also ran in 2017 and in 2015. I haven’t checked 2013. I know the strip is still in original production, as it’ll include strips referring to current events, so I’ll keep reading it a while yet.
Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 27th mentions the “Old Math”, but going against Comic Strip Law, not as part of a crack about the New Math. This is just a simple age joke.
Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 29th is a joke about rabbit arithmetic. You know, about how well rabbits multiply and all.
Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy Classics for the 29th, which originally ran the 23rd of November, 1949, is a basic cheating-in-class joke. It works for mathematics in a way it wouldn’t for, say, history. Mathematics has enough symbols that don’t appear in ordinary writing that you could copy them upside-down without knowing that you transcribe something meaningless. Well, not realizing an upside-down 4 isn’t anything is a bit odd, but anyone can get pretty lost in symbols.
Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 29th builds on the phrase “do the math” representing the process of thinking something out.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 30th originally ran the 4th of May, 1932. It’s one of those jokes subverting the form of a story problem, one about rates of completion.
This wraps up the past week’s mathematics comic strips. I should have the next Reading the Comics essay here Sunday. And starting tomorrow: the Fall 2019 Mathematics A To Z. The benefit of this sort of schedule is I have to publish whether I’m happy with the essay or not!
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