And this cartoon ran in newspapers last August, less than a year ago. Now, this sort of thing has happened in the past on occasion, but it usually takes me a lot more than 10 months to forget a gag. (Of course, some are more easily forgotten.) I suppose it is a gray area. The punch lines are not the same, and--Heaven knows--I knowingly use the same set-ups time and again. Yet the timing and the joke are so similar, I wouldn't have consciously done this. To make matters worse, the 2004 cartoon is better.