Funny Aneurysm Moment/Newspaper Comics

Newspaper Comics are usually referred to as "the funny pages." This is when the funniness sadly disappears.

• One Pearls Before Swine strip featured one of the crocs being disappointed that Steve Irwin's head has never been bitten off. This was published mere months before his death from a stingray attack.
  • There was an entire series of strips about Rat running for city council against a dead guy that got spiked because they were due to be published right when Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash (even though they were written more than a year in advance).
• Similar to the Desmond Llewellyn incident, Charles Schulz's last Peanuts strip - which consisted of his announcement of his retirement and an amiable, grateful farewell to his fans - was written four weeks in advance (like most comic strips) and printed... on the morning of his death.
• One late 90s FoxTrot strip has Roger and Andy sitting on the couch. When Andy asks what they're listening to, Roger informs her that some guy went into the wild and recorded the ambient sounds of different environments. "So far, it's pretty relaxing." The third panel has them both looking up as the 'guy' says "Hey, get away from that equipmen-" followed by growls, ripping noises, and screaming. The final panel of the strip has Andy reading the title of the CD over the sound of a burp and birdsong; "In the Midst of Grizzlies". Guess what documentary filmmaker Timothy Treadwell, immortalized in the film Grizzly Man, was doing with his girlfriend when he died. Go on, guess. What's more, his camera captured an audio recoding of his death, but it has never been made public.
  • Treadwell is moaning at the beginning, but his girlfriend is still alive and shrieking in pain and horror, which one commentator compared to a recording of wounded game used by hunters to attract predators. Considering that the bears returned to finish eating her and Treadwell...
  • In another strip, Roger has a nightmare about being forced to give stock certificates for his retirement that he had in place for retirement to a Salvation Army bin, to which it is heavily implied that they are even more worthless than nickels and dimes. Concerning what ultimately is happening now, that dream is so real.
• Speaking of those pirates... it should be noted first of all that due to newspaper comics being written weeks in advance of publication, sometimes they'll wind up pulling a Funny Aneurysm after the event in question. Such as April 13, 2008's Bizarro panel.
• In a series of Doonesbury strips from the early 70s, Duke Harris, who's based on Hunter S. Thompson, accidentally shoots his assistant. Nearly thirty years later, Thompson accidentally shot his assistant.
  • During the early stages of the Tiananmen Square protests, Trudeau ran some strips in which the character "Honey" Huan returns to China for a class reunion, only to be caught up, befuddled, in the midst of the protests. This story arc was dropped once the protests were quelled with a tragic massacre.
• Bloom County featured several comics making jokes about the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles (specifically, an arc depicting them spending their honeymoon in New York). This isn't quite as funny after you consider their divorce and her death...
• Several Italian Disney comics featured Uncle Scrooge as the owner of a newspaper that always seemed to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. This was always played for laughs. It doesn't become so funny once you consider the present situation of print media. It gets even worse by the fact that some writers portray the paper as a normal-functioning respected news source, giving anyone who reads the stories in a certain order the idea that the paper was a successful venture that started spiraling into the abyss.
  • While we're on Scrooge: a Don Rosa story has a floating money bin (It's a Long Story, involving alien phlebotinum) flying through twin towers... as you can see in the image (one of the balloons has an asterisk), a recent reprint has a footnote saying the comic was made before 9/11 (1997, to be precise).
• A literal example occurred in The Far Side: a strip involving Dick Clark aging 200 years in 30 seconds on national TV. That's a pretty accurate description of what has happened to him since his stroke back in 2004. And now that he's dead at 82, it's even worse.
• Take a look at this political cartoon from 1870, using anthromorphisised countries to depict the situation of Europe before World War I. Now, notice how Germany's hand is resting on Belgium...
• In an early Zits strip Jeremy bemoans the that his generation doesn't have an epic, "where were you?" moment like the Kennedy assassination. Then came September 11th...

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