Today's comic was too cool to pass up.

September 15, 2002 3:45 PM

Today's comic was too cool to pass up. I'm normally a big fan of Foxtrot to begin with, but Bill Amend really pulled a fun stunt in today's online comic. Who can spot the inside joke first? Does anybody else have a favorite memorable inside joke from the funny pages? c'mon, I couldn't resist so lets just pretend it's still Friday...
posted by LuxFX (23 comments total)

It didn't hit me until I read "...super fine Scotty Adams', ..."

That's when I realized the mentioned 'hotties' were all cartoonists.

Where's my pony?
posted by gummi at 3:55 PM on September 15, 2002

I cought it on Dan Piraro, as I used to be a big fan of Bizzaro. That's funny though.
posted by atom128 at 3:56 PM on September 15, 2002

i couldn't get all the way through it.
posted by donkeyschlong at 4:07 PM on September 15, 2002

My favorite in joke was committed by Charles Schulz.

In one Peanuts strip, he had one of his characters calling from a telephone booth and reciting the booth's telephone number. Perhaps without realizing it, Schulz used Bill Melendez's home phone number.

One Sunday morning, weeks later, when the strip was printed, Melendez began receiving calls in response to the strip.
posted by SPrintF at 4:07 PM on September 15, 2002

oh, snap! that rocks.
posted by clango at 4:38 PM on September 15, 2002

Wait a minute, it was the names that was the joke? I thought it was the circuitous route to a nearby destination, a'la Keane (the previously discussed diabolical genius).
posted by mr_crash_davis at 4:38 PM on September 15, 2002

Anybody got a link to that Fox Trot Sunday strip where the Roger (the dad) asked for some java, so Jason (the grade-school genius) writes his typical wakeup routine -- in Java?

Lotsa in-jokes in the code, too -- ISTR something like
initialize_brain(void)
posted by alumshubby at 5:27 PM on September 15, 2002

Jeez, I thought it was MapQuest joke.
posted by kozad at 5:37 PM on September 15, 2002

good one, mr_crash_davis, that's certainly another way of seeing it.

and it was the scotty adams and jimmy davis together like that that tipped me off originally. bravo bill....

here's my favorite programming-related foxtrot

but in term of cross-referencing cartoons, I loved how there were so many strips that made some kind of bow to The Peanuts when Charles Schultz retired/died....
posted by LuxFX at 6:42 PM on September 15, 2002

Hey alumshubby, here ya go, it's one of my favs too.
posted by RubiX^3 at 7:09 PM on September 15, 2002

Thanks LuxFX (and Bill Amend of course) for the link, i'll have to use that when i'm teaching loops. As for best foxtrots, my personal favorite is the imac Halloween costume where the scary part is that it "Has NO floppy drive!" (sorry, no chance i'll find that one in the archives). Geek humor at it's best.
posted by NGnerd at 7:59 PM on September 15, 2002

Well, it's not really an in-joke, but this Marmaduke Cartoon (which ran on 06.02.99, archived at Cam's site) is one of the funniest cartoon slip-ups (depending on how you look at it) I've seen...
posted by almostcool at 8:20 PM on September 15, 2002

Oh man, that Marmaduke one is five kinds of wrong.

Funny though.
posted by geekhorde at 8:55 PM on September 15, 2002

NGnerd, omg, I cut out that iMac strip from the newspaper, but it's in storage somewhere. :(
posted by hobbes at 9:20 PM on September 15, 2002

Of all the things that Amend does with his strip what I always admire is how even with simple blocky drawing style he draws everything with great accuracy. When he draws Roger golfing, his grip is correct; Jason actually draws correct complex math formulas on the board, and so on.

My paper keeps threatening to replace me with Marmaduke because my editors drink heavily.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 9:27 PM on September 15, 2002

...though I s'pose there's always Google (3rd link down).

And now that I think about it, we could've just searched through the archives and looked at the strips 'round Halloween time. I looked through all the October 31st's, but came up emtpy, then I noticed that it was "10-21" on the scan.... geesh.

Official Archive

btw, RubiX, how'd you find the Java one? Just had it bookmarked?

On an other note, while I was searching, I came across this Wired article on Amend
posted by hobbes at 9:35 PM on September 15, 2002

Ugh... first link was faulty, but just look for "foxtrot imac" on Google. Also, "another" and no period.
posted by hobbes at 9:37 PM on September 15, 2002

While I'm posting a billion times...

2002/07/26
2002/07/28 (goes with the Wired article, too!)

...and how come Bill Watterson was not one of the fine men that he mentioned in today's strip?
posted by hobbes at 9:40 PM on September 15, 2002

I think Darby Conley is dreamy.
posted by redsparkler at 10:02 PM on September 15, 2002

how come Bill Watterson was not one of the fine men that he mentioned in today's strip?

Simple, no one can find him.
posted by jragon at 8:55 AM on September 16, 2002

ditto, redsparkler. get fuzzy is where it's at.
posted by badstone at 10:06 AM on September 16, 2002

how come Bill Watterson was not one of the fine men that he mentioned in today's strip?

maybe retired == graduated? :)
posted by LuxFX at 10:43 AM on September 16, 2002

I got it on "super-fine Scotty Adams" too.

That was great.
posted by SisterHavana at 9:42 PM on September 16, 2002