In the comments to a previous entry, someone pointed out that this week’s ‘This Modern World‘ strip contains a coded message. This past Friday, while killing time at a bar before a show, I accidentally opened the local ‘alternative weekly’ to this particular strip, and using the knowledge of the strip’s title and author (Tom Tomorrow) as a key, I decoded the message that runs along the bottom of each panel. The full, undecoded strip can be found here. To see the decoded message, simply click on the panel below (My decoding is in red helvetica).

     There’s a brief mention of the rogue ‘P’ in the message on Tom Tomorrow’s site:

     ”(1) The news logo behind the aliens translates as gibberish because it is gibberish; and (2) Yes, apparently if you translate the crawl, I mistyped the word “moron” as “morpon.” And while I’m flattered that so many of you would take the time to figure that one out, I have to say, you’re scaring me a little bit here, people.”

     A less politically-pointed coded message can be found in nearly every ‘Spy Vs. Spy’ strip. The original artist, Antonio Prohias, ‘signed’ the strip in morse code. Interestingly, though the late Prohias (1921 – 1998) no longer pens the strip, his coded signature still appears in it.