Today’s crop of cartoons includes a Bizarro, a Zippy, and a Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
(#2)
(#3)
In #1, the kid is obviously a cartoon character, while his parents are represented as what count as “ordinary people” in the comics, that is, “realistically” (think Mary Worth), though the father looks suspiciously like the God figure in Zippy. In any case, it’s a metacartoon.
In #2, for four panels Griffy ruminates on astrophysics while Zippy quotes advertising slogans. An odd sort of antiphony, the two voices having nothing whatsoever to do with one another. (Antiphony is normally a kind of conversation between voices.)
Finally, in #3, we find edible punctuation, and more. On the first two diner stools we have a question mark and an explanation point, and the latter is ordering donut holes (not necessarily understood as puctuation marks, plus donut asterisks (* makes a tricky baking), and corned beef and hashtags (note phrasal overlap portmanteau: corned beef and hash + hashtag, marked by #).
Then on the last stool, a percent sign, and behind the counter, a dollar sign. On the order board, three punctuational puns, naming things to drink or eat (with the colon, the comma, and the caret).
