The wife of a once-popular singer (Gary Busey) is found dead.

July 31, 2010 2:36 PM

A lawyer is secretly a stripper. Detectives look for a racist. Radiation kills a tormented scientist. Briscoe and Green search for lost customer. Homeless men are murdered. A complicated murder case. These Are Their Stories: Art based on one-line summaries of Law & Order episodes.

via Wondermark.

posted by Captain Cardanthian! (38 comments total)

"Sugar Daddy Suspected of Murder" was almost exactly what I pictured in my head about that summary.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 2:43 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm sad... conceptually promising but most of the pieces didn't do it for me.
posted by L'Estrange Fruit at 2:46 PM on July 31, 2010

I love A Rich Man and His Very Young Daughter Are Shot.
posted by leesh at 2:47 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Kate Beaton! Scott C!
posted by The Whelk at 2:49 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is only kind of related, but I have to say that, for as long as I can remember being familiar with the term, the phrase "banana hammock" has always conjured in my mind the brief scene of a banana with legs and arms, wearing, in fact, a banana hammock and sitting up on a regular hammock strung between two palm trees on a beach, and it stops reading for a second to look up at me from behind sunglasses, and then it puts down the book and puts on a big, toothy smile and makes that cheesy little hand-gun pow-pow greeting gesture, and I have to assume that the banana is probably winking as it does that, and this is what I see in my head every time I'm reminded of the phrase "banana hammock," as I was with that first image.

So, there's that.
posted by invitapriore at 2:50 PM on July 31, 2010 [5 favorites]

The titular link is pretty epic.
posted by mek at 2:52 PM on July 31, 2010

I liked Death of a Bully.
posted by The Potate at 2:53 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

The reverse of "Briscoe and Green search for lost customer" is pretty cool.
posted by grouse at 2:54 PM on July 31, 2010

I enjoyed these, thanks. I would also like to get my hands on a few of those Special Valentines Unit cards.
posted by Gator at 2:56 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Brandon Bird makes me very, very happy.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:58 PM on July 31, 2010

Some of these are the bestest things I have ever seen ever. Yay!

A couple of them really suck, though.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:00 PM on July 31, 2010

EmpressCallipygos:

They're for sale.
posted by argybarg at 3:09 PM on July 31, 2010

Race becomes an issue.
posted by box at 3:09 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Law and Order Criminal intent always had some pretty insane plots whenever I watched it (which was not all that often)
posted by delmoi at 3:11 PM on July 31, 2010

Whoops. I meant to address that to Gator.
posted by argybarg at 3:12 PM on July 31, 2010

Sadly, Law & Order died with Jerry Orbach
posted by hamida2242 at 3:15 PM on July 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

I liked the "Colorful World of Horse Racing" except that it was in black and white. "Feuding With the Mafia" and "Ring Identifies Attacker" were obvious but still good for a giggle. And the ones by the artists behind Dr. McNinja and Wondermark's were stylistically obvious but still fun. Not everybody went for a joke but that's okay, it made the funny ones funnier and made you think a little longer about the non-funny ones. And Brandon Bird's been mining this vein for a while. I don't know what he's going to do with "Law & Order: Los Angeles" but with the acronym "LOLA", it should be fun.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:18 PM on July 31, 2010

I always liked this one the best.
posted by limeonaire at 3:30 PM on July 31, 2010

This reminds me of (the sadly defunct) Spamusement -- I think it's the combination of bizarre lines of text with hilariously literal artist interpretations.
posted by punchdrunkhistory at 3:40 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

The titular link is pretty epic.

Hey, that one's by Chip Zdarsky! I like his Prison Funnies.
posted by dobbs at 3:43 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is only kind of related, but I have to say that, for as long as I can remember being familiar with the term, the phrase "banana hammock" has always conjured in my mind the brief scene of a banana with legs and arms, wearing, in fact, a banana hammock and sitting up on a regular hammock strung between two palm trees on a beach, and it stops reading for a second to look up at me from behind sunglasses, and then it puts down the book and puts on a big, toothy smile and makes that cheesy little hand-gun pow-pow greeting gesture, and I have to assume that the banana is probably winking as it does that, and this is what I see in my head every time I'm reminded of the phrase "banana hammock," as I was with that first image.

Good job, now half the people reading this are going to see it every time now too.
posted by DMan at 4:06 PM on July 31, 2010

It's a bit off to be labelling Quentin Tarantino as a paedophile though.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:28 PM on July 31, 2010

Law & Order died with Jerry Orbach

The last season/season and a half had gotten good, but then they decided to not renew it so that the insane SVU could continue stuffing monkeys into basketballs.
posted by drezdn at 5:50 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

At one point in my life I was underemployed and had a lot of time on my hands. TNT was pretty much the L&O channel back then. They would play at least 4 episodes a day (sometimes another 2 or 4 that night). On the weekends it was often L&O marathons. I did little but watch them for nearly a year. After watching each 3 or 4 times it got to where I was living for an unseen episode. Eventually it got to where even I couldn't force myself to watch one I'd already seen, but somewhere in here I developed a mutant power and any 30 second shot of the body and I could tell you how was killed and why and how the court case came out.

I never watched any of the last five, but I bet I could still do this for any of the first 14 years and I haven't seen an episode of L&O in probably 5 years.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:12 PM on July 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

If Lisa Hanawalt was the art director, law And Order could go on for at least another ten seasons. Or until the drugs ran out.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:21 PM on July 31, 2010

Those are The Outsiders! Ha!
posted by cazoo at 6:34 PM on July 31, 2010

I hate to be one of those I-think-that-thing-started-sucking-even-earlier-than-you-do types, but I think L&O took a sharp turn downhill when Steven Hill left.
posted by box at 8:12 PM on July 31, 2010

You had me at Kate Beaton.
posted by tommasz at 8:22 PM on July 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

And you had me at... I don't know. None of those artists really turn my crank. Except maybe Dyna Moe. She's cool.

Though I kind of like the superpowered Benson though.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 9:36 PM on July 31, 2010

Is it just me, cjorgensen, or do Moriarty episodes never show up in reruns?
posted by box at 10:06 PM on July 31, 2010

Yay, I was hoping someone would post this!
posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:08 AM on August 1, 2010

They're for sale.

A little too rich for my blood these days (am coping with an uptick in vet bills right now).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:20 AM on August 1, 2010

Wait a minute ... I've been to this site before. I've always greatly enjoyed Nobody Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 7:13 AM on August 1, 2010

I don't even watch TV and I'm not sure I've ever seen L&O, but I could tell who the people in the Kate Beaton one were supposed to be and what show they came from even without the explanation.

/not superior-cos-I-don't-watch-TV, just marvelling at the power of pop culture.
posted by immlass at 11:46 AM on August 1, 2010

Brandon Bird is amazing. Thanks for posting this; I hadn't kept up with his recent work.

By the way, his portrait of L. Ron Hubbard is just...I don't even have words. It's the admiral in his labyrinth, with pizza.
posted by AkzidenzGrotesk at 12:09 PM on August 1, 2010

Allow me to be the first to say:

*CHUNG CHUNG*
(1997, mixed media)
posted by armage at 9:47 PM on August 1, 2010

Race becomes an issue.

I spotted that one. Too. Is Alf really in a L&O episode?
posted by mrgrimm at 10:30 AM on August 2, 2010

That picture should have shown him hiding in a closet a la Elian Gonzalez.
posted by Gator at 10:32 AM on August 2, 2010