Heathcliff Halloween

So here's Heathcliff by George Gately with a Halloween gag from 2005.  Very map-oriented.  Heathcliff is, of course, one of the two most famous comic strip cats, along with Garfield... both spoofed by Berkley Breathed's Bill the Cat. 

Wrong Georgia on my mind II

About a month ago I posted a funny fail concerning the wrong Georgia referenced in an online news story.  Here's the sequel.... or the result?

Also, that post and this one brings the total number of U.S. states referenced by this blog to 25.  We're half way there!  I'm willing to take bets on which state will be the last one referenced by a post on this blog.  And if y'all want to send me map-themed cartoons that reference states, please do.

How to embarrass your teen with Google Streetview

Is this a case of oversensitivity on the part of the teen or insensitivity on the part of the parents? From Betty (by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen)

By the way, photobombing Google Streetview is a rather popular prank to play around the world. Here's a pair in Norway who have made quite the splash on the internet:

Fun with depth perception

This would be a brilliantly fun experiment to try out, albeit somewhat complex. From Randall Munroe's XKCD.

At the actual webcomic, hovering over the image reveals this additional message in the "title-text":

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

Christo two-fer

Here's another in our collection of map-related comics with artist themes. Y'know this post would have been perfectly topical back in 2005 when Christo [and Jeanne-Claude] did [their] installation in New York City's Central Park. However it's fun enough now to see two completely different cartoonists doing two completely different jokes using almost the same exact imagery.  I just wonder why the one has the tied-up part on the North Pole while the other has it on the South Pole.  

Christopher Weyant in The New Yorker (which ran in August of 2004, six months before Christo's Central Park installation)

Mike Peters' Mother Goose & Grimm

Spiderman GPS

Oh wow! Spiderman offering a ...reverse blackmailer? ... a better-than-GPS Spidey Tracer (TM).

I always thought Spiderman was cool.  And in general, largely because of Spiderman...(and then Wolverine... and some X-men students... and a great friend from my youth)  I always thought Marvel heroes were better/cooler than DC heroes.  The Superfriends Saturday Morning cartoon didn't help the DC crew for me.  Those shows were deeply lame.  I think I remember seeing one episode that started off with the big name heroes doing a golf charity event. That's just all kinds of wrong. 

So when I started noticing and reading Spiderman in the newspaper when I was smaller I was excited to be able to follow along in his adventures without having to buy comic books (not that I wasn't allowed to have those comic books.  It's just that for some reason I never had the money and/or inclination to go buy some). It took me a while to realize that newspaper Spiderman was mind numbingly dull.  The storylines ran on for weeks... months even. I'd lose interest and then realize I'd missed the exciting climax of the storyline.... until I realized the climactic part of the story wasn't very exciting... partly because it was stretched out over a few weeks.  So I gave up on newspaper Spiderman for a very long time.

Now I only see it as the butt of snarky commentary on The Comics Curmudgeon blog where he shows up regularly as being rather thoroughly inept. And frankly newspaper Spiderman is a lot more interesting this way.  A few months (years?) ago newspaper Spiderman tried a reboot and restarted the storyline with a still-in-high-school (or was it college?) still-living-with-Aunt-May Peter Parker.  Somehow the newspaper Spiderman fans raised enough of a stink to get the old storyline back.  Goodness knows why. 

My question here is what in the world makes the Spidey Tracer (TM) better than GPS?  ... And why would perpetually-worried-about-money-one-trick-pony-print-newspaper-reporter Peter Parker keep such an amazing technology to himself? 

Newspaper Spidey is almost as lame as late-70's-Saturday-morning-cartoon Superfriends.

Fantasy world map

This is a brilliant amalgamation of map spaces from fantasy fiction.  My very favoritest part is how they have Narnia on the opposite coast from the same continent on which is Middle Earth.  For a very long time now I've had the hypothesis that Narnia and Middle Earth were part of the same continent and that Tolkein's westernmost lands of Valinor are actually the same place as Aslan's Country in the uttermost East in Narnia.

Extra points if you've read all of the books here referenced.

Map hustle

This week's animated map Thursday involves a heist.  It's a scene from a BBC show entitled "The Real Hustle".  This video is a re-enactment of what is purportedly a real con whereby a fingersmith pretending to be a tourist approaches a mark with a large-lensed SLR around his neck and asks for directions, brandishing a map. While they pore over the map together -- and under its cover -- the crook unscrews the lens and spirits it away.



Do be careful out there.

Rick Perry's plate

This is a recent editorial cartoon by Monte Wolverton based on the narrative that the record of job creation recent GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry keeps touting relies heavily on the creation of some rather low-paying jobs.

If y'all come across any more election-themed map-related cartoons please let me know.

Accidental Two-fer war

World War III? Hmm. O.K., but, remember, nobody gets hurt.

Robert Weber had this published in The New Yorker in March of 1999... incidentally during the height of the dot com boom.  WWIII seemed a long way off back then.  Actually it still does. That was, however, around the time of the "Wag the Dog" movie/book.so maybe that's kinda what he was tapping into?

 

Meanwhile Gahan Wilson had this similarly-themed cartoon in The New Yorker in January of this year.  The similarities are interesting.

Arlo GPS gap

This is Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson. I'm kinda surprised I haven't posted one of these yet. This one showed up on the Comics I Don't Understand blog.... as do all of the Arlo and Janis strips I've encountered in recent years. The explanations users came up with refer to his phone being an older model vs. her new-fangled smart phone looking device.

Green screen fail

So this weatherman wore the wrong color blazer today.

Geoloqi: GPS-enabled PacMan for live humans

It's about time that I plugged Geoloqi.  Aaron Parecki and Amber Case created Geoloqi, which is an amazing mobile and web platform for securely sharing location data. They have created a few location-based games, including MapAttack which can be set up and played with mobile devices in geographic spaces:

MapAttack at WhereCamp 2011 from aaronpk on Vimeo.

They're looking into other sorts of location-based gaming applications.  If you have the inclination, do please have a look-see at Geoloqi and all the amazing funa nd work things they're doing with it.

Phantom security

There's that image of the globe in that Shadow Security company logo from a recent Sunday episode of The Phantom, originally by Lee Falk.

So there's the primitive helper dude using an RSS feed and surfing the web... and The Phantom reading a book...by candlelight.... using a quill pen... for some reason.... 

Paper camera

This is an awesome paper camera made out of maps.

It's kinda alike this awesome leather hat:

....which of course reminds me of the map of Italy printed on an actual boot:

Vroomenberg?

Here is Jef Mallet's Frazz strip having fun with a GPS and insane bike riding.  BTW, Google maps can't find a Vroomenberg anywhere.

Ye Olde World Wide Web... Free!

Well here's a fun "Free WiFi" sign, eh?

The Maurauder's Map

How could I have gone this long without posting that most excellent of references from recent pop culture: The Maurauder's Map from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. What a perfect example of an animated map. Wonderfully enough, there are a number of smartphone apps that can accomplish pretty much this very thing, albeit without the wands and magic and stuff... and the smartphone apps tend to only work on smaller scale GPS-driven map platforms, not larger scale indoor-type GPS... and they typically only work for acknowledged networked friends, not simply anybody one wants to do surveillance on.... unless, of course, you're a hacker... or the government.... or a corporation.

Bad static hair day

Here's a handy weather report from Dan Piraro's Bizarro.

Very confusing two-fer

In 2004 I saw this cartoon on the Comics I Don't Understand blog. It was drawn by one Robert Esmay for a strip he called "Case in Point".  The CIDU blog is a place where visitors can submit hard-to-understand comics and the blogger and/or the other visitors can try to explain them

Nobody had the faintest idea what this was about. 

In 2006 Robert Esmay changed the strip to “Days of Thunder” and began to occasionally work under the name “Robert Lovely”. In 2008 this comic showed up on the CIDU blog:

Again, nobody had the faintest idea what this could possibly be about.

But, if you happen to be/know a quirky cartographer named "George", this is the comic for you/him.

If you happen to understand this comic... well I'd love to know the explanation.

Bedbugs map

Anybody out there still dealing with bedbugs? Taylor Jones has this map-related editorial cartoon for you.

I'm curious to know whether this "Cedarcide" product that gets endless plugs on AM talk radio, from both right and left screaming heads, is actually any good... for a huge variety of multi-legged applications.