Kilby writes: This is another comic that CIDU Bill drafted in 2019, but never actually posted. I think most readers will get it pretty quickly, but I have to admit that it took me a moment before I figured out the point; perhaps the same thing happened to Bill as well.
Kilby writes: This “Wizard of Id” strip was taken from an unnamed draft post that CIDU Bill created in 2019. I initially thought that it was supposed to be a reference to the song “Circle of Life” (from Disney’s “The Lion King”), but comparing the guard’s dialog with the song’s lyrics did not produce a satisfactory match.
Am I missing something, or does anyone have a better suggestion?
Although CIDU Bill drafted this Frazz strip for a post back in June 2020, he never gave it a title or wrote any text for it. I thought today would be an appropriate opportunity for it to appear.
P.S. Even if the bag is only full of wet paper towels, I like the way that the kid is about to punch it to smithereens.
Kilby writes: This is another one of CIDU Bill’s old draft posts from March 2019. The only CIDU element is how he ran into a strip from 2013 nearly five and a half years later. (I checked: Barney & Clyde was not in reruns during that month.)
Kilby writes: This is another one of CIDU Bill’s old drafts from 2019. The reference was so obscure that it might have been suitable for the authors to include their running gag with “Horace”, except that there would not have been enough space for that in a daily strip. (For those interested in background information, most of the sources that I was able to find listed the name as “Benjamin Marks“).
Kilby writes: This is another one of Bill Bickel’s “vintage” draft posts from 2018. Back then, Bill once wrote that his interest in Star Wars completely terminated after the original trilogy, so perhaps he was not aware of the significance of the inverted word order, but he also commented that “Okay, even I know who Yoda is! … Yoda’s cat on the other hand…“
P.S. I originally scheduled this for the seventh anniversary of “Rogue One“, but it got bumped to make space for the Saturday OYs. In any case, seeing as Yoda didn’t appear in that film at all, it’s clearly more appropriate to schedule it for the fourth anniversary of “The Rise of Skywalker“. Star Wars fanatics are free to discuss which of those two films they liked better; Bill’s answer would of course have been “neither“.
This comic is dated 2017 (before the CIDU server meltdown sometimes referred to as “comicgeddon”), but Bill must have retrieved it later for a new draft. The original song was released 68 years ago today, back when he was not quite half a year old.
Bill drafted this comic back in 2019; it seemed appropriate to post it on the first day of Hanukkah.
P.S. On various occasions Robin has used different spellings (such as “Hanukah“), whereas Bill was always careful to spell it “Chanukah” (as seen in the tags). Unfortunately, Bill’s memorable “(C)Han(n)uk(k)a(h)” spelling bracket was destroyed by Comicgeddon, but there was a nice bonus panel on the subject in a Menorah post in 2018.
Kilby writes: This Sunday Kevin & Kell strip‡ was drafted by CIDU Bill in 2019, but never posted. I’m not sure why Holbrook published this strip in February.† I would have thought that late fall or early winter would have been more appropriate, but perhaps the idea was to make the stash revelation completely unexpected.
P.S. (†) – Both the strip one week before and two weeks later are covered in snow; this one and the following Sunday strip look more like springtime.
P.P.S. (‡) – According to the remaining comments on the author’s website, there was originally a misspelling in the first panel, which was later corrected. Nice to see such artistic dedication!
Judging from the CIDU archive, Stone Soup was one of Bill’s favorite comics, and he originally scheduled this strip to appear shortly after it was published in 2019:
The problem is that he never finished writing the text to go along with it:
“There seems to be a common theme, especially in comic strips, that physical books are more …”
Would anyone like to take a shot at completing Bill’s sentence, or offer some other perspectives about reading (for enjoyment, not as work) in paper vs. electronic form?
Comics I Don't Understand 