Blog: christmas 2022

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, December 30, 1951

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, December 30, 1951

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Tom Corbett shows us that, even in the far-flung future, people still don't do very well at keeping their New Year's resolutions. So don't feel bad if you don't do too well on yours. Countless humans have done and will continue to do the same.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Pogo, December 28, 1966

Pogo, December 28, 1966

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Recently I saw a discussion online about why people who create fantasy worlds continue to use Latin and Latin-esque words in their stories. It was pointed out that the reason why is because people associate Latin sounding words with glory, grandeur, and a sort of ancient splendor. One person was skeptical, asking how people could think that after the empire that first used Latin, the Roman Empire, fell. It does seem odd, but Latin has been used in the Catholic Church for liturgical purposes for centuries, and Latin is still used in scientific circles for many things. In fact, Isaac Newton first laid out his laws of motion in a treatise he called Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually shortened to just Principia). It was written entirely in Latin, and was published in 1687, 1200 years after the fall of Rome.

So, writing your New Year's Resolutions not only in stone, but also in Latin, would definitely lend an air of importance to them. I don't know if…

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Tiny Tim, December 30, 1951

Tiny Tim, December 30, 1951

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Tiny Tim and Dotty are, as they should, making resolutions for the new year, but I feel like they laid a sort of trap for Paddy. I think if they were better friends to Paddy, knowing that he wanted to stop eating peanuts, they would have made sure that Paddy didn't see them, or distracted him somehow. Loudly pointing out the giant pile of them was not helpful.

All of this is moot, of course, since peanuts are actually very good and healthy for pigeons such as Paddy, at least in their raw, unprocessed form. Paddy will not want to cut them out of his diet completely, but I guess if he's eating a very large amount he can cut back a little bit.

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Toonerville Folks, December 26, 1923

Toonerville Folks, December 26, 1923

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I wrote a bit about Fontaine Fox last year. One of the things I love the most about his strips is the expressive style, and this is another great example of that. I love how, with just a few lines and a few panels, he can show such a range of emotion on both the father and the child.

It's also kind of amazing how differently children and adults perceive time. We can only think of time in relation to the amount of time we've already lived, and a year in relation to only 3 or 4 years of life is quite a long time. Adults have lived many more years than that, so we don't think of a year as being nearly as long. I think we try very hard to fool ourselves into thinking it's a long time, though.

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Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, December 23, 1951

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, December 23, 1951

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I must preface this by saying I never expected to see anything like this.

Tom Corbett was a popular science fiction character in the 1950s, inspired by the Heinlein novel Space Cadet. He started out life as Tom Ranger, in an unperformed radio play written by Joseph Greene. His name was changed to Tom Corbett based on input from Heinlein. The comic strip only ran from September 1951 to September 1953, drawn by Ray Bailey, but the character also appeared in comic books, novels, and a TV show. The character, along with the Heinlein novel, popularized the term "space cadet," which I think has fallen out of common usage these days but was a popular phrase for many years.

The stories always have something to do with Tom's adventures with his friends at the Space Academy, and the training that they undergo in order to become members of the Solar Guard. I've been a fan of science fiction and space adventures since I was a kid, and I don't remember many of them, or any of…

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