Mother Goose and Grimm's Shoe

It isn't often that Mike Peters has cameos from other comic strips appear in Mother Goose and Grimm (see Love is Grimm for the most recent example). But when it does happen, it's always a special treat -- as in the March, 31, 2015 sequence. (click image to enlarge)

The reason it worked so well, I think, is because Peters' style is very close to Gary Brookins (the current artist for Shoe). So Shoe looks like Shoe -- not another artist's interpretation of Shoe. Peters' cameos may be rare, but they're always appreciated -- at least by this comics reader.

Mother Goose and Grimm - Enjoy the Trip

I confess I sometimes go a little too far with my analysis of newspaper comics. Not so with today's example. Mike Peters had a simple but elegant meta gag in the March 23, 2015 sequence of Mother Goose and Grimm. (click to enlarge)

Peters takes a boilerplate element of the strip -- one that the reader never really sees -- and makes it the subject of the gag. And notice that because it is part of the gag, the copyright notice is treated a little differently. Normally, the entire notice would be in a single panel (and usually running vertically to keep it out of the way). In this case, the copyright notice starts in the first panel (to initiate the action), and finishes in the last panel so Grimmy can point to it (and we can get the joke) without having to go all the way back to the first panel.

Simple, clever, and so meta!

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...