Tart-stealing Wonderland character / TUE 3-21-23 / Pittsburgh-based giant in the metals industry / Cuban dance performed at a Russian villa / What the acorn said when it grew up in a classic math joke / Figure on the cover of Action Comics #1

THEME: triple triples — wacky theme answers end with three of three-letter strings (the three letters at the end of the first word plus both halves of the second word):

Theme answers:

• TABOO BOO-BOO (17A: Injury that's so embarrassing no one is allowed to mention it?)
• QATAR TARTAR (30A: Result of forgetting to pack a toothbrush for a Doha vacation?)
• DACHA CHA-CHA (46A: Cuban dance performed at a Russian villa?)
• LEMUR MURMUR (59A: Indistinct muttering from a ring-tailed primate?)

Word of the Day: Action Comics #1 (see 38D: Figure on the cover of Action Comics #1 = SUPERMAN) —

Action Comics #1 (cover dated June 1938) is the first issue of the original run of the comic book/magazine series Action Comics. It features the first appearance of several comic-book heroes—most notably the Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster creation, Superman—and sold for 10 cents (equivalent to $2 in 2021). It is widely considered to be both the beginning of the superhero genre and the most valuable comic book in the world. Action Comics would go on to run for 904 numbered issues (plus additional out-of-sequence special issues) before it restarted its numbering in the fall of 2011. It returned to its original numbering with issue #957, published on June 8, 2016 (cover-dated August) and reached its 1,000th issue in 2018.

On August 24, 2014, a copy graded 9.0 by CGC was sold on eBay for $3,207,852 USD; it was the first comic book to have sold for more than $3 million for a single original copy.

Not really my thing, for a number of reasons. Wacky-phrase themes are tough to do well, and this puzzle doesn't observe the First Rule of Wackiness, which is "go big or go home." The only answer that even breaks the smile mark is LEMUR MURMUR. A murmuring lemur is possibly funny to imagine. Someone dancing the cha-cha at a dacha isn't. Like, why not? Dance your heart out. You would never name your tartar based on where you were located, even at your most inebriated, and the only thing plausibly TABOO about a BOO-BOO would be using that "word" at all if you are more than six years old. Further, the theme doesn't work at the sound level, where I don't think it's actually *trying* to work, but where it could at least deliver some more pleasure (since definition-level pleasure is mostly off the table). The first and last themers work perfectly—you get not just a triple letter string, but a triple *sound* string. BOO BOO BOO! MUR MUR MUR! But the pronunciation of the first word in the other themers prevents this pleasing tripartite explosion from happening. Even as a free-standing word, TARTAR doesn't have two similar-sounding syllables (it's TAR-ter, not TAR-TAR). I just couldn't find the pleasure in this one beyond that small pleasure you get when you finally discover the theme (which took me a little longer than usual today—wacky "?" clues being inherently harder to make sense of than normal ones). 

Most of the grid was very easy, but those themers took a bit. I had solved to the point that I'd touched three of them before I actually got any of them. Ended up using QATAR to build back up to the first themer, where I filled in every single square via crosses (not hard). After that I could see what was going on with QATAR, and the rest of the theme answers were transparent from there on. I "struggled" a little more than usual with the fill today, by which I mean I had to think about it some, or couldn't get it quickly. Could only think of CAPES as the "C" word at 4D: Wear for Dracula (CLOAK). Just now, I tried to get Google to tell me which "C" word was more apt, but—not for the first time—Google was absolutely no help:

[Dracula cape] gets 11M hits, [Dracula cloak] gets ~3.8M. So "cape" wins, but 3.8M is a lot, so CLOAK is absolutely fine. I couldn't turn the corner at FISHES either, off the "F"—I was even thinking of "fishing" but since the word for fishing with a net is "trawling," that is the word that was in my head (32D: Casts a wide net, maybe). This is what happens when you're rushing (and you're 53 years old and it's 4:30 in the morning and and and...). I had OCHER and then AMBER before UMBER, a color I know exclusively from childhood crayon boxes (56A: Earthy pigment). Pulled the wrong abbrev. from my Abbrev Sack and wrote in PFC before UPC (62D: Bars to be scanned, in brief). Forgot there even was a KNAVE of Hearts (QUEEN fits, but is wrong) (65A: ___ of Hearts (tart-stealing Wonderland character)). Rolled my eyes once again at the idea of an -S plural on ELKS, though it has dictionary backing, so ... gotta allow it, I guess. The pun on GEOMETRY (9D: What the acorn said when it grew up, in a classic math joke) may be the dumbest one I've ever seen. It is both baroque *and* totally implausible, in that you have to absolutely torture the word to make it sound like "Gee, I'm a tree!" I mean, I know I said "go big or go home" but ... just because it's a "classic math joke" (yeesh, that's a thing?!) doesn't mean it has to abuse the English language (as well as the concept of "joke") so much. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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