Why Do They Call Them Comics: B.C.

Welp, congratulations, B.C. You just introduced the concept of the glory hole to the comics page. Well done.

Excuse me while I go sit down on an ice floe, push it away from the shore and float out to sea...

Why Do They Call Them Comics: The Wizard Of Id and B.C.

Today's The Wizard Of Id tells us in no uncertain terms that bestiality is not only allowed but warmly welcomed on the comics page.

Thank Thor the lower half of the guy with the pig is obscured by the panel border. And I don't even want to think about how the guy with the broom is going to express his love to it...

I loved anything to do with dinosaurs and cavemen when I was a kid, so B.C. was my all-time favorite comic strip. This is back when creator Johnny Hart was not only alive, but sane.

But that was then, in the before time. Now I have no idea when the strip is supposed to be taking place. Neither do the current creators. 

This strip is making fun of rapidly aging and obsolete technology, so the only way it makes any sense at all is if it's set way, way after 1982. But if that's true then these can't possibly be cavemen. Unless maybe they're cavemen who've time traveled to the present day. Or the writer forgot his strip is set in the distant past.

Why Do They Call Them Comics: B.C.

So I guess we've just outright dispensed with the idea that the B.C. comic strip is set in prehistoric times, right? Apparently it now takes place on some remote, inaccessible island that's somehow aware of the outside world and on which protohumans, dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals coexist.

Or perhaps it never was set in the remote past. Maybe it's actually set in the distant future, in a post-apocalyptic hellscape populated by the primitive descendants of humanity and talking, mutated animals that resemble dinosaurs.

The iPod joke feels like one of those references artists inject in a desperate attempt to try and make the strip seem hip and current. If I was a little more cynical I'd suspect this was an old, repurposed strip from the 1990s and they simply whited out "Walkman" and inserted iPod.

Why Do They Call Them Comics: B.C.

Today's B.C. comic defies all rational attempts at explanation. Decades from now learned scholars will still be angrily debating one another as to the meaning of this particular strip.

They will fail.