Comic Interlude

The digital ink had barely dried on my previous post, Gone Fishing, when I remembered what I did the last time I had limited time for blogging : I ran a mini-series on chess in comics. Why comics? The time consuming portion of a blog post is not the writing, it's the research. With comics, there's not much to research -- someone wrote a silly story about chess and someone else illustrated it.

My last post about comics was Chess Comics No.3: Batman vs. Penguin, from which I still had material stored for future use. There was, for example, Surprising Developments in the World Chess Championship Match [MadMagazine.com]. It starts,

Yesterday, Viswanathan Anand successfully defended his title as World Chess Champion by defeating Boris Gelfand. Now, we know what you’re thinking — the only thing more boring than playing chess has got to be watching chess be played. Well that’s where you’re wrong! The match was filled with exciting, surprising events! Don’t get us wrong, it was still boring – but for a chess game, pretty exciting!

If you think that article belongs in the Not-Everyone-Likes-Chess department, you're right. Here are its last three-and-a-half bullets, plus a rare photo of Anand and Gelfand playing with a Simpsons chess set.

'Surprising Developments'

Thank goodness that's the only chess-related piece on the site. There have been, however, other chess features in past print editions of Mad Magazine. Stay tuned for 'Chess Comics No.4'.