OK, I’ll accept the seance to a cat as “the joke” even though it’s not very funny IMHO. Knowing Larson a bit, I’m tempted to buy the cat biting the bird’s head off as the gag. First off, cats are notorious for leaving only a bird’s head at the door (or perhaps a headless body). Secondly, they are asking for a sign - not to appear as a body or to meow or say something specifically, but any sign - it’s totally keeping with Larson’s humor to have a beheaded bird as the sign. I suspect it would be more genuine to have the bird lying at the bottom of the cage or perhaps somehow hanging on upside down, or perhaps just a feather left in the cage. If Larson didn’t typically draw small animal heads…
But the fort/Native American panel - I don’t think scalping or Trojan Horse is it. It’s probably something along the lines of the Puddin Head nursery rhyme - some takeoff on a saying or folklore…
I couldn’t find the ones about the quarreling War Room technicians messing with each other’s control boards, or the man washing up on the desert island where a ventriloquist’s dummy warns him about the man who’s already there. Those are classics, too.
I don’t think she’s wearing the fur, but I do think the medium killed the cat that got her bird. Her eyes while calling for Bootsy seem to imply a little guilt.
For heaven’s sake, the parrot isn’t missing its head. Larson always drew birds with teeny tiny heads, especially when they were in the background (excepting, perhaps, chickens). Go look at some other panels if his, like the pigeons devouring the old man on the park bench. Birds drawn in profile have a line for a beak. Otherwise, a bird’s head is usually shown as a lump disproportionally small for the body.
Hell, the bird resting in the cage isn’t rendered very far from reality. Draw this straight on in black & white line and see what you come up with.
Many of the comments imply that the medium is calling to a cat, Bootsie, who evidently bit off the head of the bird in the panel. I don’t think this makes any sense. First, the medium is with a customer. The birdcage is on a stand, indicating that it’s part of the furniture of the room in which Madame Zoe conducts her business- it’s her own bird. We are looking into Madame Zoe’s own parlor. But since she’s with a customer, we are to assume that the customer came with a request to speak to a loved one, presumably Bootsie. Since Bootsie belongs to the customer and the bird belongs to Madame Zoe, it wouldn’t make any sense to jump to the conclusion that Bootsie bit off the bird’s head- there’s no indication that Bootsie and the bird had any previous reason to cross paths. I think the bird is just part of the mis en scene of the fortune teller’s parlor- wallpaper, basically, and has nothing to do with the gag.
Bootsie doesn’t care who’s bird that is. But that’s a sign that the medium is asking for. Bootsie is present. (And the two humans haven’t noticed the sign yet.)
Why does the parakeet need to belong to the customer for Bootsie to want to eat it?
There’s no reason to have a bird prominently featured if it isn’t part of the gag. Birds are not part of the usual process of contacting the dead, in fact they would normally be a major distraction during a seance.
And as myself and others have mentioned, when you enlarge the picture the bird looks like it has a neck and no head.
It’s a psychic that specializes in pets - why wouldn’t she have a pet bird? There’s simply no reason, backed by mountains of similarly-drawn birds in Larson’s past, to think that that bird’s head is missing.
That does not look to me like a bird with a tiny head; it’s a bird with its head bitten off. And that still makes no sense. Cats don’t bite off birds’ heads and leave the rest. (And dead birds don’t remain upright on their perches except in Monty Python skits.) A better way to present the joke would have been to show the cage empty with two or three feathers swirling around it.
