Noodle Incident/Newspaper Comics
- The Trope Namer is Calvin and Hobbes.
- Bill Watterson may, at one point, have intended to visit the Noodle Incident someday, but in the Tenth Anniversary Calvin and Hobbes collection, he explains that the reason he never did was because nothing he could come up with would ever be as fantastic or as interesting as anything the readers would be able to come up with while trying to work out exactly what happened.
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Hobbes: What about your explanation of the noodle incident? |
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- Half the fun of the Noodle Incident is watching how flustered and angry Calvin gets whenever Hobbes brings it up.
- A "Salamander Incident" was referenced in an earlier strip.
- Also, in one strip, Calvin complains to Hobbes about how much trouble he got into that day in school, but when Hobbes asked what happened, Calvin says he doesn't even want to talk about. When Hobbes asks if it had "anything to do with those sirens [he] heard around noon," Calvin repeats, louder this time, "I SAID I don't want to talk about it!" In the strip that immediately preceded this one, Calvin is getting dressed for school, complaining about how it never changes, and then says, "Well, not today. Today, I go for the gusto." and puts on a cape and space helmet, which seems to suggest the obvious. Moderate consensus among fans is that this is indeed the specific date/strip that the Noodle Incident occurred, as no other school exploit of his ever got all the way up to the level of emergency sirens.
- The earliest reference to it, perhaps, was when Calvin's mom goes to a parent-teacher conference, which Calvin is dreading her return from. When she gets home she catches him packing, which prompts him to immediately protest that everything was a lie, at one point bringing up "the noodles," which his mother had not heard of yet.
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Calvin: She told you about the noodles, right? It wasn't me! Nobody saw me! I was framed! I wouldn't do anything like that! I'm innocent, I tell you! |
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- And according a later Christmas strip. even SANTA doesn't know what happened, or whether or not Calvin is innocent.
- We the readers were also never privy to Calvin's favorite bedtime story Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey. At times, Calvin's dad gets irritated with the actual story and begins to ad-lib; in once such incident, Calvin wonders at the end whether the townspeople find Hamster Huey's head, whereas we wonder what happened to Hamster Huey's head in the first place.
- The only hint revealed of what was in the book, is that there is a dance called the "Happy Hamster Hop".
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Mom: But you look cute doing the Happy Hamster Hop. |
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- A literal noodle incident happens in FoxTrot, and as a result Jason gets all of his Calvin and Hobbes collections confiscated.
- In Get Fuzzy, the purported reason that the veterinarian doesn't make calls to the Wilco house is "the Hockey Stick" incident, for which Bucky is responsible.
- The unspecified "incident" that caused Brian to swear off GMing Hackmaster in Knights of the Dinner Table.
- A few other "incidents", like the Bag War, are expanded into full story arcs as extras for the back issue collections.
- In the popular comic strip Pearls Before Swine, Pig is enemies with a sea anemone due to an unknown event that occurred years in the past.
- All just a Feghoot for "Annie-May, my anemone enemy".
- In the Heathcliff comic, it's never explained why the protagonist's father is in prison (which he's always breaking out of) although the animated adaptation suggests it's for far worse crimes than anything his son does.
- Peanuts:
- Exactly how it went between Snoopy and the Head Beagle when Snoopy was charged with "not pursuing his monthly quota of rabbits" was never shown. All Snoopy said was "fortunately, the Head Beagle was very understanding".
- Speaking of which, the whole "Thompson is in Trouble" Story Arc was one Noodle Incident after another. It started with Snoopy getting a coded message from the Head Beagle saying that "Thompson is in trouble", with Snoopy recognizing the name instantly and remembering a past incident with "that stupid Thompson" that "almost got us all killed". (It's only confirmed later that Thompson is another beagle, but one can only guess what happened the last time, although Snoopy complains through the whole story that Thompson would "never listen to advice" and other such faults.) Snoopy leaves quickly to find this Thompson, does some investigating, questions a waitress in a restaurant "full of shady types" (who remembers Thompson), gets lost in the rain, and finds Thompson, but he's too late. The readers find out in the next strip where Snoopy writes his report to the Head Beagle that he had witnessed Thompson try to deal with ten-thousand rabbits by himself, and was presumably killed. (Again, it is not revealed why.) In the last strip of the arc Charlie Brown asks Snoopy if he thinks he'll ever know what happened, and all Snoopy can say is that "Those rabbits gave him an offer he couldn't refuse!"
- Beetle Bailey:
- In the strip seen here, we can only imagine what happened at the party that Mrs. Halftrack is referring to.
- In another strip, Sarge is at his desk, and he's angry:
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Sarge: Where's Beetle?? He can't just come in here two hours late with some cockamaimie excuse and expect me to listen! |
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- Garfield:
- The protagonist's owner Jon has a lot of these, and one is sure to come up whenever he brings out his yearbook or family album, or even simply talks about his past. The scary part here is, as as goofy as Jon is, he seems to have an extended family full of relatives who are goofier.
- A lot of his weird dates too. In one strip he gets a blind date with a woman named Ruby who was just released from prison; the only clue as to why she was there is him telling Garfield to "hide the potato peeler".
- In another strip, a woman tells off Jon, saying he is "the second most pitiful excuse for a man" she has ever met. This actually makes Jon feel better, although it causes a flabbergasted Garfield to exclaim, "I gotta meet this other guy!"