Only One to Challenge Antiquity

The date on this GLP panel was Easter Sunday in 1996, but the comic was published on March 26th. That was the first day of Fool’s Week in 1996. This year, the first day of Fool’s Week is tomorrow, March 29th. If you share your household with a jackalope, or have friends who are jackalopes, I’m sure you are aware that a prank war will begin tomorrow. You also know that you need not fear the arrival of mail exploding with glitter, soap disguised as candy, Saran-wrapped toilet bowls, or googly eyes stuck to any and all surfaces. When you crack your eggs for your breakfast scramble, you will not discover rainbow Jello instead of the protein, fat, vitamins and minerals that make an egg a neat little package of high-quality nutrition.

According to the Jackalopian tradition for the All Fools holiday, a prank is a ridiculously lavish gift, something extravagant and useless. It can be a book for someone who already owns a library of books they have not read yet, or a bar of dark sinful chocolate from Lithuania flavored with wild Porcini mushrooms.

Or you could buy one-of-a-kind ceramics made by local potters (Jean Shinn, Charles Varni) and fill them with dirt, rocks and plants, even though you have stacks of mass produced clay pots:

It’s a bit of foolishness that you would never buy for yourself, but then you do, and then you give it to yourself. That is the Jackalopian ideal of a prank war during Fool’s Week.

Are you saying to yourself, “Wait, what kind of war is that? That’s not a war.” A jackalope will say to you, “Au contraire!” (Because speaking with a bad French accent is also one of the many traditions practiced during Fool’s Week.) “Nobody engages in a war unless it is for their own benefit. We just remove all the middlemen–and all the toil and suffering–and get right to the benefit. It is war with efficiency. It is delightful, as war should be.”

Actually, now that I think of it, Jello eggs are delightful, and making them requires patience and a peculiar set of skills. Especially if you want to make the multi-colored stripey ones, which would necessitate the purchase of at least six Jello packets of different colors. That’s fairly extravagant, and the whole thing involves a ridiculous amount of effort.

The above image is the misprint by our favorite paragon of flawed media, Newark’s Star-Ledger, and below is my garishly exuberant interpretation of today’s comic as an animated gif.