Yo zingerfans! Marilla and I are back from our little jaunt to the Pacific Northwest. Boy, moss grows on everything up there - trees, brickwork, signposts, cats. Now back at Zingerding HQ, we’re refreshed and ready to bring you some more comic strips!

We’ll start out with the syndicated strip, Prickly City, about a girl named Carmen and her friend Winslow, a coyote pup. Created by conservative editorial cartoonist, Scott Stantis, Prickly City most often has a deep political zing. Carmen is a young Republican kid and Winslow represents a more liberal point of view.

The humor focuses on their conversations, usually as they stroll throughout their American southwestern town and landscape. The cartoonist uses this device first associated with Calvin and Hobbes whereas the characters discuss deeper issues in a whimsical setting. In reading the strip, I actually found the political commentary pretty bland, as if it was trying not to be too offensive or one-sided. An approach like this probably helps sell comics but if you ask this bird, it waters down the power of the medium. The strips I liked best were the ones that commented more on popular culture.

But here is a good political one that zings a funny chord no matter your political affiliation. Click to enlarge it. You can read more Prickly City here.

Yo! Here’s a comic strip called Squinkers by cartoonist Sandra Lamb. This one features a couple of flirtatious pigs but that’s not what the strip is really about. Squinkers centers on a young girl, her mother and grandpa who live and work on a farm/bed & breakfast. It’s a well-drawn strip with engaging characters and storylines. The zingers are sometimes too pun-based for my taste but the humor is generally good. Check it out and read more!

I chose this one from the current storyline. It’s not that often that you come across strips about horny pigs zinging up some love. Does this one make you laugh or kinda creep you out? Both for me!’

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On a side note, Marilla and I will be off from Zingerding until next week (vacation to Seattle). We’ll post again on Wednesday the 2nd. In the meantime, check out our archives of comic strip zings.

Yo! Here’s a spoof comic by cartoonist Mark Tatulli, creator of Liō, a syndicated strip about a strange young boy. The regular strip is quite offbeat and one of the best new strips to zing into the newspapers. It is told in pantomime, thus having already hit an international audience with relative ease. The humor is dark, often involving strange creatures and questionable situations.

Now check this one out. By the way, Liō is the boy with the single-spiked hairstyle. What’s interesting about this comic is that it starts from Liō in the center of the page. Follow the “jumbo ants” from there on out. I like spoofs and it’s great to see a syndicated cartoonist attack his own peers with man-eating ants.

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Marilla promised you funny last
week. What do you think of this one?

Yo! So there’s this Finnish company called Futuremark Corporation which does some sort of computer technology stuff, blah blah blah. For some reason they spun a comic strip competition into their marketing efforts. Heck, why not?!

Here’s the 1st place winner, an ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ strip by Uros Jojic and Borislav Grabovic. It’s pretty good and gave us here at Zingerding a good laugh. You can read the 2nd and 3rd place winners here. I didn’t even understand the third.

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