A whole year's worth of comics parodies and mashups!

A gloomy year demands a gloomy header image.

As recently as 2019, comic parodies were a regular feature on this blog. Then, without warning, they vanished altogether. What happened? Well, it's like this. Up until about December of last year, I was an active participant in a Facebook forum devoted to newspaper comics. I shared my various mashups and parodies there and then collected them into occasional blog posts here at Dead 2 Rights. When I gave up on the Facebook forum, I stopped doing comics-related posts on this blog, too.

But I never stopped reading newspaper comics or doing parodies of them. I just don't do them in such great quantities as I used to. Now it's late December, and I have a folder on my hard drive full to bursting with comics, so I thought I'd share them all at once. Sound good to you? Let's go.

Time for a spooktacular Halloween comics roundup!

These people are not trick-or-treaters! Do not open your door to them!

The frost is on the pumpkin, the leaves are on the ground, and the kids are all back in school having their spirits broken. That's right, fall is underway! And I have such a limited imagination that I can't think of a better way to celebrate autumn than with another comics roundup! So let's rake some comics into a big pile and then dive in!

It's an old-fashioned summertime comics roundup! (Part 1)

Sadly Priscilla's Pop is not one of the strips covered in the following article.

Hey, y'all! How's your summer going? That's nice.

I don't know about you, but I'm in the mood to throw some more newspaper comics onto the rusted-out Weber barbecue grill in the backyard and char them to cinders. Does that sound like fun? Okay, then. Let's get to it.

Comics are fun for everybody! Let's read some now!

Batman is not in this article. This image is lying to you.

I know I just did a comics roundup a few weeks ago, but I figured it would be a nice change of pace to post something non-Ed Wood-related to this blog. So let's dive in and swim, huh?

Oh dear. It's time for another comics roundup.

"Take that, you judgmental old biddy!"

The comics, like the waterfalls, never stop. That's a big part of their charm, the constancy. Sure, the newspaper industry died at least ten years ago, and the last non-ironic reader of Judge Parker died twenty years ago. But does that mean King Features Syndicate should just stop paying people to write and draw Judge Parker? I hope not.

Anyway, I haven't done one of these comics roundups since February, and they've been building up on my computer, so I figured it was time. Past time, really.

Let's have fun with the funnies! Part One: The Random Stuff

This is your cultural legacy, America. Don't neglect it.

It's been a while since I've done a post like this. As you know if you follow this blog, I do a lot of parodies and remixes of newspaper comics. Occasionally, I like to collect these and post them here so I can delete them from my hard drive in good conscience. That's what this is: another collection of random junk headed for the incinerator.

Let's go.

This is just a bunch of comics parodies and remixes, okay?

This book never existed, but don't you kind of remember it in bookstores anyway?

Look, I'll level with you. I was going through the images saved to my hard drive, deciding which ones to chuck, and I found some  comics parodies that I hadn't posted here yet. So I wanted to collect them in one big post before deleting them from my computer forever. That's what this post is. There's nothing else to this, so don't expect any incisive commentary.

Sgt. Snorkel is ready for his closeup

I find this version much more true to life.

Barney Google, Olive Oyl, Blondie Bumstead, Fritzi Ritz. What do they all have in common? They were all the stars of their own comic strips before being pushed aside in favor of more exciting, audience-pleasing characters. Fritzi became Nancy's aunt. Olive became Popeye's girlfriend. Blondie has long toiled in the shadow of her lazy, sandwich-scarfing husband Dagwood. And poor Barney was reduced to rare cameos in a strip he nominally co-headlines with Snuffy Smith. And this phenomenon isn't limited to old-timey funnies either. Such latter-day strips as Funky Winkerbean and Bloom County gradually changed focus, too. Funky is still an important character in the strip that bears his name, but his friend and former classmate Les Moore is now arguably the protagonist. And wry, bespectacled Milo Bloom never left Bloom County, but he couldn't compete with the likes of Opus the Penguin or Bill the Cat for the public's affections.

Could such a thing happen to Mort Walker's super-long-lived military farce Beetle Bailey? After all, the strip already underwent a major format change in 1951 when its title character dropped out of college to join the military. Is it time for Beetle himself to step aside and make room for one of his co-stars at center stage? Above you will see a pilot episode for a proposed revamp called Sarge, concerning the adventures of Sgt. 1st Class Orville P. Snorkel, long a second banana and comic foil to Beetle. I think this new version compares quite favorably to the original. 

We all feel a little like Ronan, The Accuser sometimes

Try to imagine Ronan, The Accuser talking like Charlie Brown.

In his newspaper incarnation, Spider-Man has been doing battle with an intergalactic baddie named Ronan, The Accuser lately. It's a dumb Guardians of the Galaxy crossover. Don't worry about it. Anyway, in Thursday's installment, Ronan called on the services of a giant automaton called a Kree Sentry. Presumably, said Sentry will start wailing on Spidey tomorrow, but I thought it would be funny-ish if the big guy didn't obey. I mean, why should he? I went to some trouble to make Ronan hang his head in defeat, but it barely reads at this size.

As long as I have you here, this is another recent comics parody of mine. I made Hi & Lois and Mary Worth swap dialogue. I think both strips are improved.

See, it's funny because the dad in the first one is abandoning his family.

And no one specifically asked for a super depressing Beetle Bailey remix, but here's one anyway.

Gen. Halftrack has seen some stuff, man. He has seen some stuff.

2016: The year in uncollected comics parodies

My tribute to the sidekicks and second stringers of the comics page.

See that tab up there, the one that says "Comics Fun!" right under the main banner? Click on that, and you'll find all the various comics-related posts on this blog. Generally, these are little spoofs and mashups of long-running newspaper comics, including (but not limited to): Dennis The Menace, Garfield, The Lockhorns, Rex Morgan, M.D., Hagar The Horrible, Blondie, Marvin, Shoe, Six Chix, and Funky Winkerbean.

I post a lot of that stuff to Twitter and Facebook, but not all of it makes it to Dead 2 Rights. So occasionally, I like to do a little roundup of comics stuff I've done recently and semi-recently. That way, people who don't follow me on social media will get to read it. That's what this post is. I was going through the files on my computer, deleting a lot of mages that I don't need anymore, and I came across some of these comics parodies. I figured, this would be an easy way to get some extra mileage out of them.

If the Sistine Chapel ceiling had been painted by Mort Walker instead of Michelangelo

Here, God is represented as lecherous, senile, alcoholic General Amos Halftrack.

It would have looked like this.

Skalbagge Förborgen: en komisk av Ingmar Bergman