Joe's AI-Generated Funnies 2: The New Batch

Is it already time for a sequel? Of course it is.

My blog generates very little traffic these days, so when an article even does moderately well in terms of views, I pay attention. Recently, I posted an article called "Joe's AI-Generated Funnies!" It was a compilation of cartoons and comics I had created with artificial intelligence. In other words, fake art for real jokes. I haven't gotten any feedback, positive or negative, about that article, but it got slightly more clicks than most of my content. So I figured it was time for a sequel. Luckily, I have plenty of this stuff lying around.

Joe's AI-Generated Funnies!

This header image was AI-generated. Am I supposed to feel bad about that?

"You scribble."

This book changed my life.

My older sister said those words to me when I was about four years old, and they had such an impact on my still-developing brain that I didn't draw or color anything for quite a while after that. Eventually, my concerned parents bought me a copy of I Can Draw It Myself (1970) by Dr. Seuss, which got me to pick up a crayon again. Very little has changed in the ensuing decades since the incident with my sister; I'm still hyper-sensitive to criticism and am liable to quit a project after receiving any negative feedback.

Dr. Seuss got me back into making art, and I was further inspired by Lee J. Ames' Draw 50 Famous Cartoons (1979), which I discovered at the Flint Public Library. Because of those books—plus the influence of Mad, Cracked, and various DC and Marvel comics—I became a compulsive doodler for decades, drawing on any piece of paper I got my hands on. Did I get any good at it? No, but I was having fun. As I've mentioned on this blog in the past, I started creating my own comics and sharing them with classmates in elementary school, and I continued doing so through junior and senior high. I trailed off a little in college, until I saw Crumb (1994), which made me want to draw again.

I used to spend hours and hours drawing. To this day, I have two thick binders of the sketches I've created over the years. They're still on a shelf in my closet now, taking up valuable real estate. But whenever I've shared my hand-drawn art with others, it tends to get one of two reactions: either total indifference or mild dislike. I think the low point of my experience as an artist was submitting a cartoon to a website and being told, straight up, that the art was not of professional quality. I call this a "low point" because the same website had recently published a cartoon that was simply a drawing of a triangle with a funny caption. That's what had emboldened me to submit one of my own drawings in the first place.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 24: And, unto us, a Superman is born!

Yeah, he has super vision but not in the back of his head!

We all know that Superman is Jesus, right? So much has already been written about the parallels between the Lamb of God and the Man of Steel that I don't really have to rehash it all for you here. Suffice it to say, many people have seen the Superman mythos as a Christian allegory, even though the character's creators (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) were Jewish. I've gotta admit, the theory makes sense. John and Martha Kent, for instance, make pretty plausible stand-ins for Joseph and Mary. Superman even died and came back to life, just like Whatshisname.

Anyway, I couldn't think of a better way of ending this 2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar than a whole bunch of Superman parodies, again mostly drawn from Comics Outta Context. Enjoy and have a lovely holiday season!

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 23: Even more Batman ones

"No jellybeans? But isn't this Easter Island?"

Batman. The Dark Knight. The Caped Crusader. The World's Greatest Detective. Whatever you may call him, he's been appearing in comics since 1939 and has crossed over to every possible medium since then. After so many decades of TV shows, movies, video games, and merchandise, is there anything left to say about this character? Probably not. But that hasn't stopped me from trying. I have a bunch of old, unposted Batman comics and cartoons left over on my computer, so I thought we'd just blitz through all of them in one post.

Ready? Then let's proceed. You wanna get nuts? Come on! Let's get nuts!

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 22: A whole bunch of Nancys

How does Nancy get her hair to do... that?

The beloved Comics Outta Context may be gone forever, but there is still at least one comics account on Twitter that has continued to delight me throughout 2024. Obviously, I'm referring to Nancy Comics by Ernie Bushmiller, maintained by the indispensable Johnny Callicutt. Each day, he will post panels or even full comic strips from the super-long-lived comic strip Nancy. What's great about the account is that it pulls from different eras -- from the early days when the strip was known as Fritzi Ritz and focused on Nancy's adult caretaker to the more recent strips written and drawn by Olivia James. But, as the name indicates, the focus is on Nancy's peak decades when the strip was done by the great Ernie Bushmiller (1905-1982).

The simplicity of Nancy makes it perfect for the kind of parodies I do, so here are a bunch of those all at once.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 21: A Pink Flamingos Christmas!

"It's going to be a lot different with a baby around."

As I've said in the past, I read about Ed Wood's movies long before I ever actually saw any of them. The same is true for John Waters' movies. Thanks to books like Cult Movies (1981) and Midnight Movies (1983), I'd read detailed descriptions of John's work, but the films themselves were difficult to access in suburban mid-Michigan in the 1990s. This was pre-streaming and pre-DVD. The internet was primitive in those days, too, but I eventually found someone in a newsgroup selling crude VHS bootlegs of the Waters movies. They were of abysmal quality, but they were better than nothing.

Today's nativity-themed comic adapts some memorable dialogue from Waters' most famous film, Pink Flamingos (1972). In the film, two lesbians, Merle (Jackie Sidel) and Etta (Pat LeFaiver), buy a baby on the black market from the villainous Marbles (Mink Stole and David Lochary) and name him Noodles. TRIVIA: The purloined baby is portrayed by Max Mueller, the real-life son of Pink Flamingos cast member Cookie Mueller. The baby's name is a punning reference to Mueller's Pasta, famous for its egg noodles.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 20: The biggest traffic ticket I ever got

"I hope nobody notices my missing door!" is a weird thing to say out loud.

Let me tell you about the most expensive traffic ticket I ever received. 

It was the early 2000s and my sister Catherine had just moved to a small town outside Ft. Wayne, Indiana. I live a few hours away in Illinois, and I decided to make the journey to her house for Christmas by car even though I hate to drive and have zero sense of direction. Sure enough, I got badly lost several times on the way but finally arrived in Indiana, shaken but intact. I stayed (in a motel) for a couple days and tried to enjoy the holiday festivities, but I was dreading the trip back.

My fears were justified. When I got back on the highway and had been driving for maybe 30 or 40 minutes, I suddenly realized that it had been a while since I'd seen a posted speed limit sign. I had no idea what the speed limit was, so I just tried to keep pace with traffic. Well, around that time, I noticed a police car nearby and decided to slow down to 55 just to be on the safe side. The officer who ticketed me later said this was my big mistake, the thing that told him I was up to no good. He tailed me for several miles but then pulled off to the side of the highway. I thought he'd given up on me and was relieved. I should not have been.

I kept driving, still going about 55. A few minutes later, this cop came roaring back into traffic with his lights flashing and (to my memory) siren wailing. In my rearview mirror, I could see he was weaving through the cars trying to catch up to somebody. I assumed there was an emergency somewhere. Turns out, the emergency was me. When I pulled over, the police officer stepped out of his vehicle and approached my car, citation book in hand. He seemed to be in a bad mood. I knew I couldn't have been speeding, so what was my big crime? Expired tags.

Now, here is where my version of the story diverges from the cop's version of the story. According to the cop, I knew perfectly well that my tags were expired, and I had sneakily tried to avoid him so he wouldn't notice. He'd known from the start that I was doing something underhanded, but it had taken him a few minutes to figure out exactly what. That's why he'd pulled over the first time. Eventually, he cracked the case: I was a fiendish criminal mastermind who had knowingly tried to drive though the great state of Indiana with Illinois tags that had expired a few weeks previously.

My version of the story was that I'd recently changed apartments and had forgotten to forward my mail to my new place. Therefore, I hadn't gotten a reminder from the state of Illinois that my tags had expired at the end of November. Besides, it's not like I was hurting the state of Indiana. The officer did not believe my story at all and wrote me a substantial ticket, the largest I'd ever received. I was really strapped for cash in those days, so it stung. For the next decade and a half, I vowed never to drive in the state of Indiana again. When I wanted to visit my sister, I did so by Amtrak.

But that's a whole other story.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 19: Meanwhile on 'Three's Company'

She zinged you pretty good there, Stanley.

I was alive for the entire run of Three's Company from 1976 to 1984, but I didn't really watch the show until it was in syndicated reruns. It was one of those sitcoms that would be on every weekday after school. That puts it in the same basic category as The Brady Bunch and Happy Days. I didn't necessarily seek these shows out; I simply watched them because they were on TV. That's how it was in the pre-internet, pre-streaming days. Choice was barely a factor in entertainment. 

Looking back, I wonder what percentage of the jokes on Three's Company went sailing over my head. I'm pretty sure one episode was about a "call girl," and I had no idea what that term meant. I certainly could not have understood the many, many impotence jokes directed at poor, beleaguered Stanley Roper (Norman Fell) by his wife Helen (Audra Lindley). It's possible that Three's Company introduced me to a lot of risque topics.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 18: Have I posted this before?

I don't hate juice in real life.

I've been blogging for so long now, I have no real recollection of what I have and haven't posted to Dead 2 Rights. It's all a blur. But I was going through my archives recently and found this one that still made me laugh, so I'm posting it now. It's another one based on a tweet by Comics Outta Context. I have a bunch more of these. 

Here's another:

RIP Margaret Thatcher. Unless you didn't like her.

One more:

Okay, now I'm done.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 17: The Elf on the Shelf Isn't Fun at Parties!

Don't be that guy.

Each family has its own Christmas traditions. Was The Elf in the Shelf a tradition in your home growing up? The book didn't come out until 2005, so it was way past my time. On the other hand, the Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer animated special premiered in 1964, so it should have been a major part of my childhood. But my dad didn't approve of that one for some reason. He didn't like the special's depiction of Santa Claus, I believe. So we rarely watched it. It doesn't pay to antagonize your parents at Christmas.

A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas were welcome in the Blevins household, however, as were such films as It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and various versions of A Christmas Carol. Again, though, my dad couldn't tolerate the musical version, Scrooge! (1970), so that one was was verboten. Even today, I'd feel guilty about watching it.

As for today's comic, it was another one written especially for this project. I don't really know much about The Elf on the Shelf, so I wrote him as a petty, pedantic jerk.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 16: SQUAWK! SQUAWK!

We now enter the 9th Circus of Hell.

Just like Jim Davis' Garfield, Bil Keane's Family Circus is one of those long-running newspaper comic strips that has inspired dozens and dozens of parodies already. I've certainly done my share. Above is just one example. There's something about Family Circus that invites parody. It's so wholesome and old-fashioned and corny that, if you're a cynical person like me, you feel almost honor-bound to subvert it in some way. You want to drag it through the mud. That's what I'm doing here, turning a typical FC panel into some kind of mini horror movie.

 Here's another example, this one a bit more melancholy.

All dads must feel like this sometimes. Including yours. And mine.

And one last one before I go.

Out of the mouths of babes, huh?

2024 Fun Comics Advent Calendar, Day 15: Fargield

Garfield is not here to amuse you.

 

Garfield parodies are, let's say, extremely common on the internet. This is another one. What can I say? I have a weakness for the classics. Jim Davis' comic strip has been running so long and has become so ubiquitous in our culture that it's only natural for people to want to subvert it somehow. That's just how people's minds work. Naturally, I've done some Garf-inspired stuff over the years, and not all of it has been posted to my blog. Here are a couple more examples:

His logic is airtight. Can't argue with that.

It's Garfield Lacking Garfield.

Okay, that last one is clearly inspired by Garfield Minus Garfield. I don't know if they've done that exact strip already, but I just wanted to do my own version. I just liked the image of the flea counter sitting on the countertop.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 14: CHEESE!

Show those pearly... uh, grays.

How's your Advent going? Mine's going okay, I guess. I haven't been religious in years. Maybe I never was. I went to church a lot as a kid, but it wasn't my idea. My mother was Catholic, which meant we were all Catholic. My dad didn't grow up in any particular religion, but he converted to Catholicism to marry my mom. Took classes and everything. I remember spending some of the most boring hours of my life at a church in Flushing called St. Robert Bellarmine. Mostly these were Sunday masses. But there are a few extra holy days scattered throughout the year when you have to go to church on, like, a Tuesday night or something.  

I remember that one of these extra masses happened the very same night the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol was airing on TV. I didn't want to miss any of it, so I was extremely anxious for that mass to end. If I recall correctly, we got home just as the movie was starting, so I didn't miss much or any of it, thank God. The ghoulish looking fellow in today's comic reminds me a bit of the ghost of Jacob Marley. This is yet another comic panel I found through Comics Outta Context and repurposed.

P.S. Has a professional photographer ever told you to say "cheese"? Is that something that happens in real life?

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 13: The unpleasant side of my personality (WARNING: SKIP THIS ONE)

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 12: Another Batman one already? Yes!

What can I say? I watch a lot of Batman.

Most of the comics and cartoons I've used in this series have been oldies. I've had them saved to my hard drive for a while and just wanted to post them to this blog for posterity before deleting them from my computer. But today's cartoon is brand new and written especially for this project. A couple of days ago, I saw an ad for a Batman Unmasked action figure and thought, "What if Bruce Wayne walked around looking like that? Would Commissioner Gordon finally figure it out?" Honestly, he might not figure it out even then. Neil Hamilton's version of the character is a pretty dim bulb.

2024 Fun Comics Advent Calendar, Day 11: Tina and the Comedy Factory

I just noticed that I never actually mentioned Tina Fey's last name in this comic. Whoops!

This was originally going to be a much longer piece. I had planned to do the complete ending scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Lorne Michaels as Willy Wonka and Tina Fey as Charlie Bucket. I even had dreams of selling it to a humor website for $50 or so. But as I got further into it, I realized my plan wouldn't be practical and that no editor would buy it anyway. So I just kind of bailed on it after a few panels. Those panels are visible above. I think this is about as good as it was ever going to be. Sorry or you're welcome, I don't know which.

Podcast Tuesday: "Oy, Canada!"

Fonzie (Henry Winkler, right) confronts a villain on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang.

Cartoons are educational! And I don't just mean the ones that are trying to be, like The Magic School Bus or Tennessee Tuxedo. I mean pretty much all the cartoons we grew up on, including Looney Tunes and the collected works of Hanna-Barbera. Like it or not, you did learn some stuff while watching those, if only through osmosis. Looking back, we were introduced to classical music, opera, and even important names and events from history while watching the adventures of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest.

But it goes beyond that. Cartoons have also served as a great museum of show business history. Long before I knew who Peter Lorre, Jimmy Durante, Mae West, and Humphrey Bogart were, I'd seen parodies of them in old cartoons. And it's through cartoons that I was introduced to the trope of the top-hat-wearing, mustache-twirling villain. Characters like these appeared in silent films of the 1910s but trace their lineage back to stage melodramas of the 1840s and 1850s! So latter-day cartoon characters such as Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dastardly have quite a heritage.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we review an episode called "Perilous Pauline" that takes place in the late 1800s in Canada. It draws on both the silent films and the stage melodramas I mentioned earlier. But is it any fun? Let's find out together, huh?

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 10: Elsewhere in the Green Lantern-verse

You know Green Lantern, right? The muscly, masked dude in green who flies around and wears a power ring that he has to charge occasionally? Yeah, that guy. I'd say he's up there in the pantheon of superheroes. He's not in Superman or Batman territory, though. Like, Superman and Batman were on Super Friends right from the beginning, but it took a few seasons before GL joined. And he did eventually get a movie, but it didn't do well, and they didn't make any more. He had a TV show, too, but it only lasted 26 episodes.

Just like Superman and Batman have their own supporting characters, some of whom are popular enough to merit spinoffs across multiple media, Green Lantern has his own colorful repertory company. Today's comic spotlights the Guardians of the Universe, a council of wise, immortal aliens who (I think) mainly sit around in a semi-circle and have meetings. I saw a picture of them somewhere on social media and decided to turn it into a little slapstick adventure. Oh, and the sound effects panel is yellow because... well, if you know, you know.

 

Before we leave the topic of Green Lantern, here's a picture of him just lounging on a pile of pillows in Stewie Griffin's room.

Welcome to pillow world, Bri!

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 9: Joy to the world! Your God is dead!

Did you find all six differences?

What's the holiday season without a little harmless blasphemy, huh? Relax. God's got a sense of humor about these things, I'm sure of it.

Today, we pay backhanded tribute to cartoonist Henry Boltinoff (1914-2001), who worked for decades in both comic strips and books. He's what you'd call a journeyman. His magnum opus, however, may be a long-running newspaper feature called Hocus Focus in which he would present two seemingly identical versions of a cartoon and ask us, the readers, to spot six obscure differences between them. I used to pore over such puzzles as a kid, though I never got good at finding the differences.

"Find all six differences" cartoons are still fairly common even today. You'll see them in Slylock Fox on a regular basis, for instance, and they're still used as filler in newspapers, newsletters, and fliers. Recently, at the office complex where I work, there was a cartoon like this projected on a monitor across from the elevators. I suppose it was there to keep people entertained while they waited.

I decided to take one of Henry's rather innocent cartoons from 1959 (plucked from Comics Outta Context) and take it in a darker direction. Or maybe Henry's cartoon wasn't so innocent! Obviously, these college students from 1959 are pretty square looking, but one of them is concerned enough about the state of the world that he worries the new year will not arrive. Can you sympathize with him? I can.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 8: In the Malph of Madness

Here, we see how comedy is subjective.

What, you thought we were getting through this without some Happy Days content? If you've been following this blog at all for the last few years, you know that I've been the co-host of a Happy Days podcast since 2018. We're currently making our way through an early '80s animated spinoff of the long-running sitcom called The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. 

On the cartoon version of Happy Days, Don Most reprises his role as Ralph Malph and is there to serve a few basic functions, namely to be the show's resident coward (a la Shaggy from Scooby-Doo) and to crack corny jokes. Rest assured, he does plenty of both. His "comedy" tends to provoke groans from his friends and outright anger from his enemies. The latter is depicted above. The angry fellow in the middle is again something I found through Comics Outta Context. Anyone know who he was or where he originally appeared?