Welcome to the 949th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. In this third legend, learn how a mistaken «Spot the Difference» comic strip caused some chaos in Baltimore.
In a recent Comic Book Legends Revealed about how a fifth grade class tried to solve a Far Side comic strip that was parodying classic comic strip puzzles, I wrote about how big of a deal that the Funny Pages section used to be in newspapers, noting that while they have shrunk in size over the years, in their heyday they were at least twelve-pages long each week, and the key thing to remember is that they were intended as a sort of weekly reader’s delight, meaning they were a lot more than just a bunch of comic strips. The comic strips were the main draw, of course, but there was a lot more than that. One popular feature in the late 1930s was The World Museum, which would have stuff you could cut out to make dioramas…
And, of course, a common part of the Sunday Funnies were fun little puzzles for kids, including stuff like Harold Kaufman’s Hocus-Focus, which was later continued by Harry Boltinoff, where you would have to spot the differences between two comic panels. When Boltinoff died, as well, the strip mostly ended (but a number of papers just reran Boltinoff’s strips. Boltinoff also had a year’s worth of new strips prepared at the time of his death). At Boltinoff’s death, The Comics Journal ran a tribute to him including a few sample Hocus-Focus strips…
So we’re all familiar with these «Spot the Differences» puzzles that run in the comic section. One time, though, a comic strip caused a little chaos by, well, you know, failing to have differences between them!
What was the errant Spot the Difference puzzle?
The Baltimore Sun is one of the newspapers that still has a nice and full Funny Pages section, and it has stuff like Jumbles and a Chess section…
And it did, at least back in 2020, have a «Spot the Differences» comic strip that it would run on Sundays. And on April 26, 2020, it ran the following cartoon…
Now, due to the image being a photograph, the lighting is off, so in case you’re, like, «the colors are different!,» they are not, that’s just lighting.
Sure enough, that’s just the same image twice.
As noted in the above piece about Boltinoff’s long-running «Spot the difference» puzzle, what the artists in these «Spot the Differences» cartoons do is that they draw the image, and simply give a list of possible changes to be made to the image. It is the newspaper’s artists themselves who actually do the changes, not the initial artist. And well, it looks like they just plumb forgot to do that in this instance!
As you might imagine, the readers of the Baltimore Sun were quite confused, especially since these puzzles are mostly done by little kids, and as shown in the Far Side legend, little kids don’t even get obvious jokes on puzzles like this, so a puzzle that says that there are differences and the differences just aren’t clear? Little kids would totally try their best to figure that out.
How did the Baltimore Sun correct the errant comic strip?
The Sun had to print a correction…
“The images in the ‘Spot the difference’ feature in the Sunday, April 26, editions were mistakenly the same image and not in fact different. The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.”
One of the Baltimore Sun’s own reporters, Nathan Ruiz, found the correction hilarious, so he shared it on his social media, and the story soon went viral. Naturally, there were a lot of memes (especially the Pam Beasley meme from The Office where she tricked her temporary boss, Creed, into thinking that he had to find the diffferences between two photos, when they were the same photo)…
A lot of other people just had fun with the idea of imagining all of the readers trying to wrack their brains figuring out the differences that weren’t there (some people kept trying to find differences even KNOWING that there weren’t any differences! That’s why I added the bit about the lighting, because you KNOW some people were saying, «No, it’s different! The color is different!»).
It’s funny, we think of the era of the Funny Pages being sort of over, but a lot of people still clearly DO care about the Funny Pages, and you can get a lot of attention when something goes wrong on the page, and it just goes to show you that while people probably don’t talk about it a lot, they ARE still reading the Funny Pages, they’re probably just doing so in a bit more of a passive way than perhaps in the old days.
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That’s it for Comic Book Legends Revealed #949! Come back soon for the next installment! Be sure to check out my Entertainment Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film and TV. Plus, Pop Culture References also has some brand-new Entertainment and Sports Legends Revealeds!
Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com.
