News post – Catch-23 No. 1248 Funny pages

Are comic strips, as a medium, still relevant today?

It’s a question I ask myself about this strange hobby of mine. Born of the newspaper funny pages, and within my lifetime, newspapers have gone from ubiquitous to archaic, essential to obsolete. So what of the comic strip?

This comic strip, Catch-23, is a digital-native – born and existing only on the internet, but still adhering to the format, visual language and trappings of something bound for the presses. Today, I leaned into it a little more, with the comic strip making a return to black-and-white, with a half-tone dot screen pattern in the background.

Comic strips must still be relevant to someone, because here you are, reading this one.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1247 Toothbot Army

Mid-week, I read the story about a hacker that used a botnet comprised of 3 million ‘smart’ internet-connected electric toothbrushes to take down a Swiss company’s web services. Sounds like the fodder for a comic strip, thinks I. A comic strip was written, with Bagel and Jaffa confronted by a crazed electric toothbrush claiming to be part of this botnet, but Jaffa points out that the toothbrush is just a garden-variety unconnected ‘dumb’ toothbrush, just looking for attention.

Then, it was revealed that the story never actually happened, and was more like a threatening scenario suggested by an information security person. Never let the truth get in the way of a good comic strip – enter Pebbles and the Toothbot Army.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1246 The Barbie Snub

Not giving Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie nominations for Barbie, but still giving a nomination to Ryan Gosling…. it’s like something out of the Barbie movie.

Barbie is not only the best movie of 2023, but the best movie for many years, and it should be sweeping every award show. The fact that it hasn’t tells me that Ken’s land of patriarchy is still closer to the real world than is healthy for anyone.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1244 Un-re-resolved

When I did the previous strip, it was just supposed to be a sequel to the first strip of 2023, not the middle strip of a three-parter, but you got to go where the story takes you.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1243 Re-resolved

12 months ago, Jaffa indeed vowed to not answer any stupid questions, and in true resolution fashion, immediately broke it. This strip is a natural evolution of the idea. Can Jaffa maintain this zen-like absence of stupidity?

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1242 Mickey New Year

It’s true, the original ‘Steamboat Willy’-era Mickey Mouse is due to enter the public domain on 1st January, 2024. This doesn’t mean that it will be a free-for-all, as Disney have been careful to refresh Mickey’s image every few decades to keep control of the modern mouse. Even if Steamboat Mickey is in the public domain, I’d still be super-cautious about using him – do you really want to spend the next few years being a test-case with Disney’s lawyers at the other table?

Mickey new year, everyone.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1240 Shrinkflation

This article on the practice of shrinkflation (reducing the size/weight of a product while selling at the same price as before) inspired the comic strip today. Turns out that not only is shrinkflation real, as we suspected all along, but it’s tracked and contributes to real inflation figures, because our dollar buys less of a product than it did before.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1239 Humanity

The events at ChatGPT headquarters, OpenAI, got me thinking about humanity and our rush towards annihilating ourselves. It appears like one of OpenAI’s projects turned out to be smart enough to trigger their ‘threat to humanity’ notification policy, and CEO Sam Altman didn’t follow the policy by telling the board, so they fired him. Then hundreds of employees did the ‘I’m Spartacus’ thing and now Sam is back as CEO and the world has some questions.

Questions like ‘please tell us more about this threat to humanity algorithm that you have built’.

I’m sure it’s fine. That big ole iceberg coming loose and heading towards the ocean is probably a better harbinger of our doom anyway.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1238 Manhole

Formula 1 racing is in the news this week with all eyes on the Las Vegas street circuit race. Things got off to a rocky start with the first practice session cancelled after 8 minutes when the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz ran over a protruding manhole cover and destroyed his car.

To add insult to injury, the team was able to sort the damage with replacement parts, but poor Sainz got slapped with a 10-spot grid penalty due to taking replacement parts.

I liked the idea of having Jaffa and Bagel play the parts of a race organiser and a Las Vegas Grand Prix investor.

Vegas, baby.

Mat

News post – Catch-23 No. 1236 Stop the Press

Dad sent me this speech that reporter Leigh Sales gave about the erosion of trust the public has in the news media. It’s well worth a read.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped getting (and demanding) bias-free reporting. The slippery slope leads here, a place where it feels safer to assume that all reporting carries an agenda.

Is there a way to re-establish our trust in the news? It might be better to just get your news from comic strips for now.

Mat