Love is Grimm

Mike Peters doesn't reference other comics strips in his Mother Goose and Grimm as frequently as some other creators. But when he does, it's short and sweet (see: Calvin and Grimm). The Friday and Saturday leading up to Groundhog's Day this year, Peters riffed on the event by breaking the fourth wall. Other artists might have gone a full week with this setup, but Peters just did two takes -- funny, and funnier. (click to enlarge)

Steve Pastis' Pearls Before Swine regularly brings in other characters, and his characters show up in other strips quite regularly. The punchline in Grimm's first sequence plays off that fact.

The second one goes a little deeper. The unabashed greeting-card sentimentality of Kim Casali's Love Is.. is hard for many serious comic strip readers to take. And ditto comic strip creators. Mark Tartuli's had fun with the characters in his strip Lio (see Lio's comic Cameos 3). And while Peters' humor is gentler, it still makes fun of the trite "Love Is.." formula.

I do wonder, though, what Grimm would have pulled out of the hole from the comics page a third time...