As teased with the Andertoons I featured Tuesday, there’s some mathematics comics slight enough I can’t write paragraphs about them. But people like seeing comics that at least say “mathematics”, so here’s your heads-up to them.
Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 18th is an anthropomorphic numerals joke. The numerals in a paint-by-numbers kit are really serving the role of indices, rather than anything numerical. The instructions would be the same if, say, a letter ‘p’ or a small square represented purple.
Pab Sungenis’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria for the 19th has Her Majesty pondering the differences between shapes. It’s absurd, but, whatever keeps you up at night.
Jerry Bittle’s Shirley and Son rerun for the 20th has a kid impressed with Mom’s arithmetic skills. This is the first time Shirley and Son has gotten mention in a Reading the Comics post, which is not such a surprise to me.
Bill Rechin’s Crock rerun for the 22nd has the kid mourn having gotten arithmetic help from his father. This strip’s rerun at least once since I started doing Reading the Comics posts. It feels like it’s run more than that, but perhaps without my mentioning.
Bunny Hoest and John Reiner’s The Lockhorns for the 23rd is a spot of wordplay mentioning geometry. I was startled to see I didn’t have a tag for The Lockhorns, but it turns out this is the first time the strip’s come up since 2015, before I tagged these posts with the names of comics mentioned. There were three mentions in 2015 (including a KenKen joke and a different KenKen joke) and nothing since. I’m surprised.
Gene Mora’s Graffiti for the 23rd is also a spot of wordplay mentioning geometry. And it comes back to the joke about one shape being a kind of another that New Adventures of Queen Victoria was on about.
This wraps up last week’s comics. I plan to return Reading the Comics posts to Sunday finally, to make room Tuesdays and either Thursdays or Fridays for the Fall 2019 Mathematics A To Z. I’ve decided what A and B are going to be, but there’s still time to nominate concepts for the letters C through H. Thank you.
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