Stephen Dedalus is Steven D. Dallas simple, no?

We know that name- Joyce makes much of it and even calls himself Stephen Dedalus in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

Of couse, Bloom and Stephen and some of the other things going on in Breathed very much relate to Joyce and Joycism.

Reading texts by use of mirrors, for example.

We made a game of finding them in the old days before "Outland" , Breathed's long defunct weekly feature.

Just whip out your old Bloom County paperbacks and read them together with Homer AND Joyce and you, too shall know the pleasure of many of B.B.'s indecipherables and seemingly nonsequitorial nonesense.Beats rationality! Even the Ashplant from Ullysses shows up from time to time. Molly's final speech gets paraphrased and sometimes scrambled. Notice how D.Dallas has a son, Augie? (Dedalus 's son, Icarus made wings of wax which melted when his ambitions and hubris drove him into the sun) Dedalus was commissioned to build the Labrynth and we know what went on in that fun house) and , if you read the old Blooms you will find much of what we all missed while we slept through classics classes.

Now, you leave GOOD CELERY be! He's doing God's work and it is more fun to read than a lot of other posts here.

Beebop-o the sound that brought surprise back into jazz.

Joyce brought fun and games into the old heroic journey saga.

Breathed brings us back to both and tells us what a penguine and his jaded friends think about little old things like "What a great and powerful mystery life really is!"

Freud noticed that nonesense starts to make sense once it taps into the inner engine and cannot turn itself off.

What has rationality and pragmatism brought us, besides no fun?

Well, a doomed civilization and a dying planet.But pocket money still weighs us down and keeps us on our Handyphones and pays our Credit Card bills, right?

The rationalists had a good run- thousands of years of it.

What did they do for us?

Cheney and Stalin and Alexander are all rational thinkers. Pragmatic success stories, each. Yet the wisest man in Athens, Diogenes turn away smart Alex with a terse remark: "Get out of my light!"

Nature is not rational. How rational is an eternally expanding universe that had no apparent reason to bang? And whither this universe? Zeno's paradoxy? What is beyond this big thing, and what beyond that? Rational?

Quantum mechanics (not that I presume to understand them) Fractal geometric irreduceability, rational? It is real- Arthur C. Clarke told us so. But, rational? How about traditional gods or even the ego's markets and human nature? Singularity. Rational?

I prefer Celery and Beebop-0 and Breathed and both D. Dalus'to anyone's expectations of rationality at this perilous inning of the game. Radience and a stiff pint with my ashplant near the beach. Waiting for the sacrifice of Iphegenia so Aeoleus will fill the sails and Penny at her loom awaiting our return.

My two fave recent comics characters having coffee, how satisfying. Is this the first time Breathed has drawn an overt homage?

I took that 'What kind of Calvin are you?' quiz and came out Hobbes. There are many Calvins, but only one Hobbes.

Hobbes rulz...always has...always will. I miss seeing that big 'n' fuzzy nutball.

Thanks, Opus, for reminding me just how much I missed him.

Bill Watterson was greatly influenced by Krazy Kat and Little Nemo in Slumberland. Little Nemo was a fantastic dreamworld. Krazy Kat was in love with Ignatz (a mouse). Ignatz would hit Krazy Kat with a brick but Krazy remained in love. Then Offisa Pupp would lock Ignatz in jail.

1st page.

3rd comment.

still teething. And we see.

Miserable and not passed,

beyond the infantile stage.

I quote myself:

"Just glancing at Goodceleryexclamationmark's 319 letters (!!), I'd say that he or she is more likely a plagiarist [than Boopie-doop], a too-rational sucker for Be-Bop's sub-Joycean affectations who has too much self-respect to commit to Be-Bop's nonlinearities well enough to do the job exactly right."

I now rescind the "too much self-respect" remark.

is so deep - I'm humbled!

but a guppy.

Pyrantia.

blah. baa.

I am always suspicious when somebody purports to allude to Joyce (e.g., Luka Bloom, who had not, at the time of his name change, actually read Ulysses--he just thought Poldy;s named sounded cool).

Can you show me some of those puns, etc--because, frankly, the Steven D. Dallas thing seems kind of Luka Bloom-y to me.

And goodceleryexclamationmark is indeed a bore. See my earlier references to his better, the man from whom he "borrowed" (heh-heh) "his" (ho-ho) "style" (ha-ha).

I don't get what's supposed to be funny here at all. Do I have to know the history of Bloom Country for this to make sense?

Then read vaporland.

I know anitacrane already corrected you, but your post made my head spin.

Those "Piss on . . . " decals are famously NOT authorized by Watterson.

It's true. The comics are the only part of Salon still uncorrupted.

Remember the times Cuz Berke parodied the DON of the Comixclan, Mickey Mouse? He escaped those wicked potential lawsuits as deftly as old Führer Walt did back in the 1930's when the REAL father of "Micky(sic)Mouse"(forgot his name) ( repleat with the Black-face mistrel costume white gloves, yellow and black and red and big shoes) failed to get his property trademarks back in Ohio court after the Disney theft, after the shock of his own critter portraying Steamboat Willie (drawn up c.1927). Disney is the true Comix phoney.

Breathed once ran concealed identity skits on (Don) Mickey (the fraud)in a torture witness chair and has routinely savaged his colleagues as a running gag. He has actually taken on Watterson before but here, as Dedalus exposed beneath as Hobbes, has yet more layers of meaning.

I keep telling everyone to truly understand B.B. one must comb through pages of James Joyce and perform Joycean tests on even the fine print. Look for the "Radience" or any pun in Greek or Hebrew. Exposees are another Joyce illumination. Odd, that the Tiger, Hobbes isn't very Hobbsian and also Steve isn't very much like Dedalus- except for the Labrynth of his libedo and his proximity to Mr. Mulligan, Mr Bloom and, of course Midas.