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.

The existential ennui of Jeffy

Alone. Why must he be alone?

Context is everything. Bil Keane's heartwarming Family Circus is a single-panel feature, meaning that we really only get to see a few seconds of the characters' lives at a time. Maybe if we saw what happened right before and right after, we'd have a different view of the proceedings. So it is with today's cartoon. Jeffy is really only there to be a sounding board for Dolly. But what if the larger, more interesting story were all about Jeffy? That's what I've tried to convey here.

Speaking of recontextualizing the funnies, here's my pitch for a spin-off of Crock.  It'd be about the adventures of a imaginative, rambunctious boy and his best friend, a sassy talking vulture. You might think this looks a little familiar, but trust me -- it's all original, baby.

Nothing second-hand about this.

And just to round things out, here's a little comic I pieced together out of panels from Mark Trail and Rex Morgan, M.D. Enjoy.

You'd best not talk to Jules that way, June.