Wrong class

Ya ever had that dream where you're in the final for a class you've never attended?

Exploding world

Here's The Slow Mo Guys blowing up the world:

Let them eat cake

Want some cake?

Europee'in' caricatures

Here's a map submitted by my friend Rob.  I've seen this before on Frank Jacob's wonderful Strange Maps blog.  It's in full color there with a lot of background information about where it came from and what it's about.  

 

It's actually quite similar to another item on the Strange Maps blog that features many different incarnations of octopi on maps representing various geographical villains.


The last thing that I want to mention is this article which theorizes that the little guy representing Sardinia/Corsica is a peecursor to the "peeing Calvin" meme that adorns some vehicles in modern times.

CANT-ada

This is another item from Amanda, this time as a commentary by Aislin (alias Terry Mosher) from about 1990 on Canada's inferiority complex or limitations.  Personally, I don't buy it.  What little I've experienced of Canada and Canadians tells me it's offering a very lot.  Click the image to embiggen and read the details.

DEFCON

An item from The New Yorker by Christopher Weyant which uses the maps-on-the-wall graphic short-hand to indicate a war room command center.

African unity

Paresh Nath gives us this graphic commentary on the benefits of African Unity.  I knew there was a map in this, but it took me a bit to see it (it's almost east-up).  I thought I saw Australia first, but that made no sense.

Tornado

Senator Tom Coburn's comments about not allowing any emergency disaster relief without offsetting the money by cutting other things, by R. J. Matson:

Havens

Here's a very topical cartoon by Kevin Siers based on the recent stories about Apple's tax avoidance schemes:

Monty pair

Here's a pair of comics from Jim Meddick's Monty that are loosely related to each other via a "navigation" theme:


Aerial navigation. It has been windy here lately and my son recently got a stunt kite. 

 

 Tracking is kinda like navigation, right?  

Chart with Heart

Peter Steiner gives us this selection of charts from the early '90s in the New Yorker magazine.

Accentuated

Here's an article about some guys who made a map of accents in the US.  And here's their interactive and overflowing-with-information site... and their map:

Hard bargain

And that's how we got most of the United States of America.

From above

A few weeks back there was a post from a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic by Zach Weiner that included a from-underneath shot of Antarctica. This time he used a from-above view of the north pole (panels 9 & 10).  Still ends in disaster.  Here's a link to a larger version of it.

You are horse

Here is a debut of The Dark Side of the Horse by Samson doing a You are here gag, an example of which i haven't posting for a while:

College tour

Dan Wasserman's commentary on student debt and for-profit colleges (although the non-profit colleges aren't much better debt-wise, are they?)

Chocolate map

Another example of a map-related cartoon from The New Yorker by Roz Chast:

Map of all music

This is the link to Every Noise at Once, an interactive map of all genres of music. 

Click on a genre to hear an example. Click the ">>" on any genre to see artists in that genre... and then click on any artist to hear an example of their work: Click "Scan" to let it play random samplings of everything on the page. I wonder how long it will take before this gets monetized by iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Songza, etc.?

It worked for me in Chrome, but not in Firefox.

Pair of Uncle Sams

Here's a pair of Uncle Sam themed maps in comics from Amanda.  The first is from Aislin (alias Terry Mosher) from about 2002.  The second is from John Collins from about 1953.

For now?

A contemplative moment from Questionable Content by J. Jacques ...with some unfulfillable foreshadowing?  In an only slightly related manner, here's a link to an article discussing whether technologically-imbued "superpowers" would make humans more or less altruistic (there's a video).

Super Mario Bros tube map

Somebody named Chris Evans made this Super Mario Bros map in the style of the London Underground tube map. It's like these others:

Very, very large dog

How about we actually do a map in a comic in this Maps in Comics themed blog: That second panel in this "Birchard, The Very, Very Large Dog" spoof comic from Ruben Bolling's "Tom the Dancing Bug" has that globe with those Americas-looking land masses.

Mess with Google

There has never been a shortage of people ready and willing to mess with Google's StreetView cars:

Which isn't to say that Google Maps also doesn't have plenty of quirks. For those of you who may not understand why this cemetery in Wisconsin might be funny, in modern parlance YOLO = You Only Live Once:

2 Berlins

One artifact of the division between East & West Berlin can be seen from space in the lighting of the different halves of the city:

Even more stark, of course, is the divide between North and South Korea:

But none of this should be a surprise because there are artifacts of human divisions from hundreds of years ago that still express themselves in various ways today.  Take this map of Poland that shows the electoral map of Poland in 2007 and the borders of the late 1800s - early 1900s German empire:

Or this map that shows areas of intense cotton production in 1860 and counties voting for Obama in 2008:

And there's more, always more, of this kind of thing.

Ingrid Dabringer's maps

This is the artwork of Ingrid Dabringer.  She has made a series of pictures by anthropomorphizing maps.  Here are just a few.  There's more on her site and here:

Emperor Pierre Bourque

Here's another submission from Amanda: Mayor of Montreal Pierre Bourque depicted by cartoonist Garnotte (aka Michel Garneau) as emperor Napoleon:

 

Harry Potter's iPhone

Here we have a Photoshopped conceptualization of Harry Potter's iPhone, complete with the Marauder's Map app:

Earthist

Robert Mankoff cartoon in the New Yorker magazine.

Bizarre

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic by Zach Weiner.The from-underneath shot of Antarctica is novel.  This could be a HHGTTG reference.

Staple City

100,000 staples arranged over 40 hours by Peter Root

The Making of Ephemicropolis from Peter Root on Vimeo

Tidal wave of love

This is from Safely Endangered by Chris...[lastname?].