Pooh Talk

(For a big, whopping view of this cartoon, click on Pooh's honey pot.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Human Heart.

I don't normally post my Sunday cartoons until later in the week, but this one was so popular that I decided to chuck it up on the Interwebs a bit sooner. This was a collaborative effort between my buddy, Cliff, and I . He suggested the pun, "Edgar Allan Pooh," and I came up with a way to portray it.

My chosen vehicle, of course, is from Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Tell-Tale Heart, in which the narrator kills his roommate because his gooey eye creeps him out and buries him beneath the floorboards of his house. When the cops come over to chat with him about the disappearance of his roomie, he arrogantly invites them in to sit down just above the hidden body, believing he is so clever he can never be caught. He clearly had not seen a single episode of CSI, where they can catch you because you left behind a mite from your eyelash. (Sidenote: If his roommate had been CSI's David Caruso, I could totally understand his behavior. That guy creeps me out more than a hairy, talking mole.)

SPOILER: Anyway, he starts to go nuts (like he wasn't already) and thinks he hears the corpse's heart beating beneath the floor. He thinks the cops can hear it, too, and confesses. I've often wondered how he could think he was so clever in hiding his crime when the thing would begin to stink to high heaven in a day or so but whatever.

The truth is that something very similar to this cartoon actually happened in A. A. Milne's original manuscript for The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. Pooh was quite naturally creeped out by Eeyore's nailed-on tail and becomes obsessed with it. In a fit of hyperactivity brought on by a weekend honey binge, Pooh caves in Eeyore's head with the honey jar and buries him beneath the floorboards.

Believing this would damage the book's "cute quotient," editors removed this episode from the final book.