Suburban vacation

In July of 2007  Michael Fry & T. Lewis did this Summer-Vacation-themed Over the Hedge episode.

Miss the pram

Dave Parker gives us this somewhat cynical turn-by-turn directions gag.  By the way, pram = baby carriage. 

Early road trip

A cover by William Steig from The New Yorker August of 1937 here's a fascinatingly early depiction of that now-storied American pastime: The road trip.

Homeward Bound

Here's a cute map-related comic by S Harris.  What breed of dog would that be ya think? And where's the other dog and the cat?

By the way, today's date is one of those truly rare binary dates: 10-01-10.  There'll be another in a few days, sure, and a few next year.  And then a 90+ year dry spell. 

Berzerkistan

In this Doonesbury from November of 2007

You are suspicious

Rex May Baloo gives us this "You are here" gag, this time involving the Department of Homeland Security. 

GPS-in-Law 2

From April of 2008 we have this GPS/in-law joke from Herb and Jamaal by Stephen Bentley. I made a post that I titled "GPS-in-Law" last month.  This one approaches that gag more directly.  But does it qualify as an "abusive GPS" gag?

What a waste

Frank Cotham got this published in The New Yorker in June of 2001.  Who are these guys?  By 2001 only China and Russia still had enough missiles to bother aiming them at specific U.S. cities and neither of them has any economic or military interest in doing so.  Or are these U.S. military planners trying to figure out where to deploy defensive missiles? 

Lost appliance

Yesterday we did a "spouse arguing about directions" gag.  Today it's artist Steve Way's turn.  Maybe the fridge is following them. 

Fold the map

George Booth had this "spouses arguing about directions" cartoon published in The New Yorker in May of 2001.  I'm not sure if it's part of the joke that the driver apparently has this car driving on the wrong side of the bridge. Who even uses AAA maps anymore?  The AAA site features an online trip planner powered by Navteq, which is the same outfit that powers Mapquest and Bing Maps.  There's still a place on their site for getting hardcopy maps.

I just want to make a plug for the much better alternative to AAA:
Better World Auto Club (it kicks asphalt!)

And, yes, Better World has hardcopy maps available too.

You are there

Here's a surrealist take on the "You are here" gag from Marc Tyler Nobleman. In case you can't see it, where the mall map on the actual directory says "You are here", the mall map in the reflection in the window says (in reflected backwards type) "You are there". 

Is it possible that the guy is Conan O'Brien?

No map for you!

This is a photo from Engrish.com of some directions by somebody who didn't want to go through the trouble of making a map.  I hope the tourist information center doesn't get lost when it follows these directions.  Maybe next time they will put a map there.

Treasure Maine

Here's another episode of Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller from July of 2008.  Click on the image to make is larger and more legible.  This kind of imaginative activity is par for the course for the Danae character in Non Sequitur.  Her miniature horse pet/buddy hasn't yet been able to talk much sense into her.

This is, however, the first time Maine gets a direct mention in the blog, so that makes 16 of the 50 states appearing in various posts so far.

New York City constellation

J.B. Handelsman had this published in The New Yorker in July of 1992.  I've often thought it'd be funny if it was, in fact, some ancient, long abandoned polytheistic mythology which turned out to be the fundamental truth upon which the universe operated.

Redistricting Israel - Sharon

This cartoon by "Chapette" of the International Herald Tribune pre-dated this one which covered almost the same topic. The only major difference is that this one involves Ariel Sharon who died between the time this editorial cartoon went to press and the one featuring Ehud Olmert aired a year-and-a-half later. It's a gerrymander gag combined with the ill-fated "Roadmap for Peace".

GPS belly button

 

This is another Over the Hedge by Michael Fry & T. Lewis from November of 2007. For those who may not have guessed, Hammy is a deeply odd character.  Hammy masters the GPS quickly and uses it in later adventures.

Atlas-in-law

Last week we did the Roman version of this same gag.  Here Graham Chaffer does it combined with the "spouses arguing about directions" gag. It's still also an "Atlas" gag, but it's not as much of a "scale" gag.

Warm enough for ya?

Gahan Wilson gives us this alien-themed map-related commentary on global warming from an October 1995 issue of The New Yorker.  Coincidentally, 1995 is still in the list of 10 warmest years on record (either 2005 or 1998 tops the list depending on different calculations... though one study claims it's 1934 for various detailed technical reasons).   If things keep going as they are so far, 2010 promises to kick 1995 out of the top 10 listing and stands of good chance at hitting the top, or near the top of the list. Will that mean these guys in the UFO will be back soon?

Ready for my close-up

The Book of Biff, that fantastic surrealist webcomic by Chris Hallbeck. Like the first Biff post, this one also deals with a scale gag. I'm sure this derived from the artist's concept of Google Earth's collection system, however in truth almost all urban "satellite images" seen on Google Earth and the other internet mapping sites are aerial photos.

New Restaurants

Why not do another cartoon by Roz Chast this week? Just because this one from The New Yorker in July of 2001 is too tiny and detailed to be legible (sorry, I couldn't get a large enough version so that even clicking on it won't help.  If anybody out there can find a larger version of this which would be legible I'd be much obliged).  I'm sure that even if it were larger, most of the restaurant jokes it contains would be missed by non-New Yorkers. And don't confuse this with Chast's "Folk Art of Midtown" which she did the previous year. It's much better labeled on The New Yorker's cartoon archive site.  But it doesn't involve a map.

This sort of insanely detailed drawing and too-much-text is very much par for the course for Roz Chast submissions to The New Yorker.  I'm guessing that this one ran on two full pages when it ran all those years ago.

Ancient GPS

Link to image here

Dan Reynolds gives us this rather elaborate Atlas joke.  It's actually a combination of an Atlas joke, a scale joke, and a GPS joke. This post here, another "scale" gag, is actually the most visited post on my blog, consistently logging more hits every week.  And while its concept is almost identical to what's going on in this post, I somehow doubt this post will get the same number of hits.

If ya take a look at where this Roman charioteer is pointing on his Atlas, that's in the middle of deepest Africa.  No wonder these guys are hopelessly lost.  That wasn't even part of the "known world" back then... or at least not part of the world known to the Romans.

Big Sky

Here is a map of Montana by The New Yorker veteran Roz Chast from April of 1996.  This ran about a year after the Unabomber was caught and about a year after the Oklahoma City bombing.  This issue of The New Yorker hit the stands just before the Columbine shootings took place.

The "gorgeous mosaic" reference in the title comes from New York City Mayor David Dinkins who described the city's diversity thusly.  So this is a joke about diversity, or possibly the lack thereof.

Clicking on it might not make it large enough to read.  Here's a run-down of the captions:

• Obsessed environmentalists
• Obsessed anti-environmentalists
• UFO buffs
• Militia groups
• Organised tax-dodgers
• Mad bombers
• Right-wing religious fanatics
• Macho writers, their hippie wives and their hippie children
• Hollywood pseudo-cowboys in need of privacy, open air, and a full-time personal staff of forty

This version will be larger and more legible.  It comes from that great site "Strange Maps" which has a more in-depth discussion of it than i care to tackle right now.  :

I also want to mention that today, with Montana, this is the 15th state referenced in this blog.  Only 35 to go (and i already got D.C.)

Metric system

Here is a map that shows in red all of the nations that don't yet use the metric system: Liberia, Burma (aka Myanmar) and ... The United States of America.  Not so much comic as just sad.

About 10-15 years ago I remember hearing about some guy who sued the US government for not converting to the metric system. He claimed that it wasted a few billion dollars each year in converting measurements over for import/export labelling.  Then there's the catastrophe of the Mars Surveyor/Climate Orbiter where they lost the interplanetary probe due to different teams in the mission using different measurement systems.

Four Corners of the Earth

Where are the four corners of the earth?

Joseph Farris gives us this cartoon about the 3D nature of the Earth.  If the little girls wants to learn about a flat Earth here are a few teachers who might accommodate her: This guy, this guy, and maybe whoever made this "globe" of Kansas.


For an absolutely wonderful map of the Four Corners of the Earth, please see this post at the excellent blog "Strange Maps" by Frank Jacobs, where you can learn, among other great things, that the origins of the "Four Corners of the Earth" concept typically come from these Bible references: 

• Revelation 7:1
• Isaiah 11:12
• and to a slightly lesser extent, Job 28:24, 37:3

In truth, this brings up an interesting topic because one of the defining characteristics of cartography for hundreds of years has been involved the complex mathematics involved in projecting the 3-dimensional planet onto 2-dimensional surfaces, since making a 3D globe at a scale that was even remotely useful has been impractical... until now.  With the advent of powerful computers it's now possible to perform cartography directly in 3D, even at 1:1 scales, or sometimes even higher.  Hundreds of years of math projections could become almost obsolete, used only for the occasional hardcopy printout.  Google Earth would blow the collective minds of cartographers even 50 years ago.  And yet the leading modern professional mapping software is still solidly stuck in a 2D platform.  Go figure.

Famous drive

In the upper right-hand corner of this print ad from 1948 is a stylized map of the "Niagara Parkway" which is the "Famous Drive" referred to at the top of the ad.  This is from the AdClassix site which had hundreds of old print ads available for sale. This is from the post-War era when touring these United States in mammoth new cars was rapidly becoming a new American pastime. And this was even before the Interstate system was born. I gotta say that Oldsmobile sedan looks HUGE!

Map the genome

He's a genius in genetics, but he can't fold a genome map.

Nick Downes gives us this cross-disciplinary genetics/cartography joke... with maybe a little origami thrown in.  To be fair, however, since the genome involves billions of base pairs, no genius could put it on a legible paper map.

Portables

This is another fun episode of Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson. I found this particular item funny for 2 reasons (which are actually the same reason from 2 different perspectives):

1. I went to elementary school in the Las Vegas, Nevada area.  During that time it was in a rapid growth phase.  Every year it seemed there were another crop of portable classrooms going up at every school. Towards the end of my senior year I found out that there were about 6,000 people moving in to the city every month.  The school district didn't have a prayer of keeping up with that pace.
2. Just a few years ago I was working on a project that involved finding up-to-date maps of school attendance boundaries, i.e. maps that showed which school a child would attend based on where they lived.  It was very hard to find school districts that had such maps.  Clark County School District had them, which is where las Vegas is.  Those maps were being updated online every week.  

So there could be more truth to Petey's dilemma here than his mother realizes.

Second Earthly thoughts

Mick Stevens had this in The New Yorker in February of 1991. There's a lot of similarities in both style and the actual gag between this one and one he did 12 years later about Mars' close-up with earth.  There've been several posts here about UFO's, but this one comes the closest this this same gag.

Fore!

This is from Danny Shanahan, from The New Yorker in December of 2004.  I'm not a big fan of golf.  This is part of a decent-sized grouping of map-related comics that deals with God on a cloudy perch interacting with and/or contemplating His Earthly creation. I didn't notice at first that it's a lightning bolt on the tee.

Eat your heart out Tracy

This is from a February 2009 Sunday Foxtrot, by Bill Amend. I love this kind of joke. And I love Foxtrot and wish it'd go back to dailies.  Can you hear me Mr. Amend? This does remind me of this Dick Tracy post from a while ago (not actually from the Dick Tracy strip).

War With New Jersey

This is another Saul Steinberg cartoon that was published in The New Yorker in February of 1987.  Steinberg, of course, was the guy who inked the classic and much imitated map cartoon cover of The New Yorker in 1976.

New Jersey doesn't often fare well in humor... not even map humor.  But it could be much, much worse, as South Park showed.

Should be here

Here's a "You are here" gag by Mike Baldwin's Cornered strip. It's most like this one from

Napquest II

This is Roz Chast in November of 2004 in The New Yorker doing effectively the same gag as 's Napquest.  This comes from the category of indoor GIS map-related comics. It also fits into the grouping of "turn-by-turn" directions jokes, as well as Mapquest jokes.

GPS-in-law

It has been a while since we first saw some of Jeff Stahler's work here.  This, like the last one, is from his single-panel comic Moderately Confused that runs in newspapers.  He's also a prolific editorial cartoonist for the Columbus Dispatch.  I'm not entirely sure whether this qualifies as a "spouses arguing about directions" gag... methinks it's about to be.  It could be an abusive GPS gag. 

You were here

Clive Goddard gives us what appears to be a reincarnation version of the "You are here" gag.  Is that a Buddhist temple or a stupa in the background there?

Mars calling

Mick Stevens made this cartoon for The New Yorker in September of 2003 when Mars made some headlines for its unusually close call to Earth.  So far, posts from cartoonist Mick Stevens have been planetary in scope.

Amerigo for the steal

 

 In this episode of the webcomic Sheldon, by Dave Kellet from December of 2008, Arther the Duck and Grandpa mull over the oddity that is the naming of America.  The thing is, No matter how bummed Columbus may have been about the naming of the continent, I suspect the Native Americans were rather less happy about things. 

And, by the way, here's another webcomic which plays with the naming of Amerigo's America, map comics about the various Americas (North, Central, South), and Bugs Bunny's hilarious take on the Columbus story. 

Almost all mine

This item by Gahan Wilson was published in The New Yorker in June of 1987.  Greedy guy, this king is.  Quite a bit like this one about Queen Elizabeth. It's kind of like the "view-of-the-world" map cartoons that have been posted here, here, here, and here.... and kinda here. 

GPS - Global Parental Supervision

Calvin Grondahl is one of my more favorite editorial cartoonists, but this particular cartoon doesn't fully engage me.  However it's nice to see him use a GPS theme.  It presents a concept similar to this one in Wales.

I'm not sure when this ran, but it may have been in connection to this system or systems like it which use a DVR technology to record activity inside and/or outside of the car and, if the system notices a sudden change in acceleration, like an accident, or erratic driving, the device keeps the video record of the events.  Insurance companies like it.  Some parents think it's great.  Personally I think it's a good idea.  Progressive has a program that puts a little device is the insured car that monitors driving habit and gives a discount for good driving.  It's not as sophisticated as the camera system linked above. In the 1990's, towards the beginning of the advent of the "1-800-How am I driving" bumper stickers, there was a group of parents which got an 800 number and bumper stickers and put them on their family cars once their teens started driving.  The teens hated it.  Then the calls started coming in... mostly on times the parents were driving.  The teens suddenly thought it was fantastic.

There's probably a few dozen parental supervision apps available by now.

You are basic

Canary Pete gives us this fairly standard "You are here" gag.  This is the basic model.  Most other versions of this, especially the lost in the desert versions,  have a bit of a twist... even if it's just a little something...often involving penguins for some reason. 

UPS Strike

In August of 1997 UPS workers mounted a major strike and, after 15 days, won.  Roz Chast got this take on the strike published in The New Yorker soon after.  I think The Easter Bunny here would be getting the easiest route... though Superman may have the least populated areas.

Fork in the road

 Chris Grosz gives us this item about a fork in the road.  His last one was about a fork in the road too, though it was more theological. 

You are crushed

Carroll Zahn gives us a much better rendition of the obvious "You are here" gag than Chris Patterson did in the post from a couple days ago.  Although, that looked a little more like a cross than an "X" to me when I first saw it.  I thought the guy might be clergy at first.

Free atlas

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis has always been a bit punny, but sometimes it gets rather thoroughly out of hand.

You are unimpressed

Chris Patterson, gives us this rather obvious "You are here" gag. There's a better way to do this particular joke.

Drabble GPS 06

Last one in the GPS story arc from Kevin Fagan's Drabble May 2008.That felt long to me.  Did it feel long to you?

Drabble GPS 05

More of the GPS story arc from Kevin Fagan's Drabble May 2008. And now we get to the part of the story arc where the father turns out to be right all along.  I've never been a big fan of Drabble.