Friday, January 09, 2004

"I am made happy and also afraid¡¡"

Starting back on Monday, Jim Meddick's comic strip "Monty" has been running a continuous gag based on the following premise:
Because of the high cost of domestic cartoonists in the new global economy MONTY COMICS has relocated its production facilities overseas to ensure affordable cartoon entertainment for you, the budget-minded consumer.
The drawings have been changed to something vaguely Mesopotamian in style, while the dialogue is made to sound "foreign." The grammar and word order, for the most part, are standard English, except for the use of irregular punctuation -- a reversed inverted question mark (¿, but flipped on its axis) and an inverted exclamation point (¡) -- and odd phrasings. For example, in the Wednesday strip

''We will dine upon meat and bread delicacies prepared by your unclean, imperialist corporation.''  ©2004 Jim Meddick Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association Inc. (NEA), a division of United Media

Moondog's line "These too we will consume until we have become fattened like swine before a feast" is ridiculous, but it is still grammatically correct. I don't know why, but it still makes me laugh, especially the appearances by Rambo on Thursday and the fight between J.R. Ewing and Rambo on Friday.

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