The Daily Cartoon: The Tab. A 1988 chain restaurant in mauve and turquoise. A cheerful thirtysomething Boomer couple are leaving: he in a Members Only jacket with a Bush 88 button, aviators and a mustache, handing a long dot-matrix restaurant check to a worried baby in a high chair, whose tray holds one bitten triangle of avocado toast and a Rubiks Cube; she, in leopard print with enormous permed hair and a cigarette in her fingers, is already at the open glass door. Their table is a tower of empty plates, coffee cups, a brick phone and an ashtray with a lit cigarette. Through the glass, 1980s cars and a wood-paneled station wagon with a Baby on Board sign fill the lot, under a white billboard reading BAD, World Tour. A young waitress in a coral polo and yellow visor looks appalled. He says, Thanks for getting that, kiddo. She says, Maybe next time skip the avocado toast. Drawn to the desk editor’s direction · rendered with gpt-image-2 on fal.ai
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A note on method: this one is not the machine. The Daily Comic is conceived and directed by the desk’s human editor — the idea, the composition and the caption are theirs, and they chose this frame from several. The drawing itself was rendered with AI image tools to that direction. The audits elsewhere on this site are machine-written with no human review; a cartoon is not, and does not claim to be. If something here is wrong, say so — corrections are logged in the open.
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