Change the map

Herb and Jamaal by Stephen Bentley.  Sometimes comics aren't that funny.  That's when it's time to turn to The Comics Curmudgeon to gripe about them.

New York at Night

This is the cover of The New Yorker for December 23rd, 1950, attributed to Alain.  This, of course, was before the satellite views of the Earth at night.

Under the river

Bob Krohmer gives us this take on combining the traditional holiday song with spouses arguing about directions.   I thought "the horse knows the way"... so why do they need a map?

Everybody's a critic

Let's do another by Bruce Eric Kaplan.  This one was in The New Yorker in January of 2000.  Everybody's a critic.  This would have been a more efficient way for Ford Prefect to get his Earth article written:

Ford Prefect was desperate that any flying saucer at all would arrive soon because fifteen years was a long time to get stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mindboggingly dull as the Earth.

Ford wished that a flying saucer would arrive soon because he knew how to flag flying saucers down and get lifts from them. He knew how to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairan dollars a day.

In fact, Ford Prefect was a roving researcher for that wholly remarkable book The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Storyboard

Bruce Eric Kaplan gives us this item from The New Yorker in April of 1999. God commenting on His creation is a common enough theme in these map-related comics.

You definitely aren't here

Cartoonist Ralph Hagen does a "You are here" gag.  This gag is very often done with a desert theme.  This one is much more adamant about not being in a place than this one.

South Polar Express

Foxtrot, by Bill Amend, did a story arc involving the dad having a Christmas/Polar Express-themed dream.  This installment in the arc involved Mapquest.  The question there about going forward or turning around is related to this post and especially this one. Then there's the penguins Amend decided not to try to draw.  It's too bad that Amend is only doing new Sunday strips.

Navigating to Walden Pond

Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey starting off another globe-trotting adventure.  This time to Walden Pond... for Christmas.... for some reason.  The last panel gets it a place in this blog.We've seen Sherman's suitcase before.


Did you know Jim Toomey did a TED Talk?

Battle plan

This is by Stuart Harrison.  I have no idea what it's supposed to be about.  Playing demonic version of Risk with CDs?  Is this a commentary on the music industry? What's that Masonic-pyramid-symbol-thingy-from-the-back-of-the-one-dollar-bill supposed to represent?

The Fuzzy Way

Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley is the intelligent, innovative, engaging strip that Garfield can never be. Same basic cast of characters, deeper content.

This episode's fantastic Rand McNally reference was custom-built for this blog.

Road to heaven

Elmer Parolini gives us free maps to Heaven in this cartoon.  If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what is the road to Heaven paved with?  Gold bricks?  But that's the roads in Heaven, right?  Is there a difference between the Road to Heaven and the Highway to Heaven?

Speaking of nifty paving, check this out: A machine that paves out a carpet of bricks.

Don't make me

Eric Lewis got this published in The New Yorker in August of 2003.  Very similar to several other similarly themed New Yorker God-Earth-related cartoons.

Old map

Stephen Hutchinson gives us this fun comment on the problem with old maps.

Going west with xkcd

It's the brilliant webcomic XKCD by Randall Munroe.

Go to this actual webcomic, hover over the image, and there will be an additional message in the "title-text" . This one says:

Listen, they request that you stop submitting a listing for your house labeled 'WHERE YOU BROKE MY HEART'.

You are org chart

Cartoonist John Morris did this one which is more of an organizational cartoon than a map or directory cartoon. But I'll still count it.

Gone with the brush fire

Liberty Meadows by Frank Cho.  Exquisitely drawn, and very silly.

Out of town

Robertson Royston gives us this cartoon about directions amongst aliens.  Is this supposed to be Halloween?  If it is shouldn't there be other people in costumes?  Unless the other two people are actually kinds in rather impressive disguises as adults.

Shoe planet

Roz Chast, regular contributor to The New Yorker, can draw some pretty impressive map-related comics.  This one from 1992 has a geology bent to it.  Different labels include: Shale, Sandstone, Underground cave, Coast, Limestone bed, Trapped fossil fuels, Magic land of Tjxsprt, Igneous rock, Molten lava core.  I'm not sure why this comic needed to involve a shoe.

And of course this reminds one of a passage from the Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex:

"Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet — people, cities shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It's a well known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds — you've seen one of them — who cursed their feet, cursed the ground, and vowed that none should walk on it again. Unhappy lot. Come, I must take you to the Vortex."

Monroe in grass

Frazz by Jef Mallet.  Of course there's plenty of sites dedicated to finding interesting things on Google Earth and other aerial imagery sites.

Even more interestingly, there's a group that printed a photograph onto mylar sheets so that it had various levels of transparency and then they laid that out on grass for a few days.  When they removed the mylar the photograph had developed perfectly in the shadings of green in the grass.

... which is somewhat similar to this troublesome forest that was planted in 1937 for Hitler's birthday:

Mercury guide

Cartoonist Philip Berkin gives us this cartoon of Mercury/Hermes, Messenger to the Gods, looking up addresses in the A-Z map guide which has been ubiquitous in England for decades.  A-Z is shorthand for "map" or "street guide" in the same way that Thomas Guide once was in many US cities, especially in the Southwest.  Thomas Brothers Maps was purchased by Rand McNally.  I thing the Thomas Guides have largely fallen out of favor with the advent of maps on smart [phones and GPS devices.  I'm guessing the same has happened to A-Z guides.  Can anybody out there form England confirm this?

Sales territory -bert

This one is a bit of a stretch, simply because it uses the word "territory".  But I'll take it.  And it's a good excuse to post a Dilbert comic by the legendary Scott Adams. I've got better map-related Dilbert cartoons for the future.

You are cliff

A "You are here" cartoon by Joe di Chiarro.