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It’s the 2023 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser!

When Josh launched The Comics Curmudgeon almost 20 years ago, blogs were new and Google hadn’t yet figured out how to hoover up most of the ad revenue: a kinder, simpler age. Since that time, he and others have developed an assortment of ways to support the quality daily comics mockery we all know and love. Surely one of them fits your requirements and preferences exactly!

• Commenters can enjoy an ad-free online experience, a WYSIWYG comment editor, plus ten full minutes to fix that banned word, life-destroying revelation, or traceable personal information. Comes in handy, let me tell you! Become a Website Subscriber to The Comics Curmudgeon at the link.
• Busy professionals don’t always have time to browse the website, but live in fear of missing even a single day of professional-grade newspaper comics mockery. Get The Comics Curmudgeon delivered ad-free to your inbox every day, beneath the radar of corporate web filters and other such killjoys, under the pretense of checking your email. Sign on as a Newsletter Subscriber, and lighten up your workday.
• Patrons of the arts will enjoy the opportunity to support all of Josh’s comedic efforts— The Comics Curmudgeon, The Internet Read Aloud, and more, with support through Josh’s Patreon page. It’s like you’re Lorenzo de’ Medici (Il Magnifico!) or something, without all the murders!
• Traditionalists give the old-fashioned way—PayPal! Click the banner upstairs to make a one-time contribution from your PayPal or credit-card account.
Now with AI, like everything else!
• Pluggers don’t much cotton to all this seamless, virtual, new-fangled nonsense. They send cash money in the mail, and we better by-gum like it! We do! Just request Josh’s address, where you can send cash, checks, gemstones, banned pharmaceuticals, live ruminants, and more. Short on funds? Hock your TV!
• Kids today embrace incomprehensible instant-payment applications like Venmo, which turn photos of speckled squares into financial support for cultural icon Josh Fruhlinger. Sound sketchy? Try it and see!
• Drive-by readers can help boost advertising revenues by turning off their ad-blockers selectively for this site, and occasionally clicking an ad that looks interesting. Every little bit helps!

Contributions in any form are always completely confidential and deeply appreciated.

A short note on the banners: in fundraiser posts before last year’s, banners were selected randomly with every page refresh. For a variety of technical and security reasons, WordPress no longer accepts the script that made this possible, so now it’s one banner per post. But click here for an index of links to an absurd number of legacy Comics Curmudgeon fundraising banners stretching all the way back to 2008. And thank you, generous reader!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Blondie, 8/7/23

… and my OnlyFans clients are insatiable!

Crankshaft, 8/7/23

Medical Economics: Crankshaft pines for the days of general practitioners, but his proctologist has gotten rich off this colossal asshole.

Judge Parker, 8/7/23

Sam is blind to the profundity of Lev’s evil, so I’ll spell it out: Sam, is that a child sitting in the front seat? Do you see a carseat anywhere? Does she look like she weighs 65 pounds?

Heathcliff, 8/7/23

Body positivity is lost on skunks.

I feel that the Blondie creative team is trapped somewhere and sending us coded shirt-messages. Anybody know what “υ – ε” means? It’s Greek to me.

—Uncle Lumpy

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Bizarro, 8/6/23

Josh’s dogged (foxxéd?) seventeen-year investigation into the post-animalpocalypse world of Slylock Fox has given us deep insights into the cruel, authoritarian, and relentlessly petty society that replaced human civilization. It’s like a worldwide Home Owners’ Association using a gestapo and tactical nukes to enforce garage setbacks and paint codes.

But what of the Before Times? Alas, we have only fragments, no doubt because the social and technological structures that maintain a historical record were destroyed in humanity’s collapse. We know that Count Weirdly struggled to replace mankind with terrifying genetically-engineered animal-folk who were somehow not pluggers, and that his first attempts went horribly wrong.

Now we see the fruits of Weirdly’s second try: The Age of Cats. This fully realized urban civilization sprang Covid‑like from the Count’s lab and swept across the earth. The Age ended suddenly when the cats invented the Internet and were instantly absorbed into it. Sort of like the Maya, but in the cloud, with adorable memes.

Sally Forth, 8/6/23

Who’s up for a Sally Forth recap? You are? Okay!

The Forths head off for a fun-in-the-sun vacation and rent their house to the Park family for the duration when strange things happen. Young Emma Park joins and tries to boss around Hil’s band, develops a werewolf obsession, starts showing up in Hil’s friends Faye and Nona’s Apartment 3-G‑style flash-forwards, and gets all chummy with Hil’s boyfriend Duncan. Dad Dae Park starts freaking out at the sound of the ice cream truck and launches a campaign to grill the perfect summer burger. Mom Joon Park dives into Sally’s Starlee and the Moonbeams reruns and finds them “glorious.”

Faye and Nona deduce that the house is turning the Parks into the Forths, and likely releasing its hold on the Forths themselves as well. They negotiate with the evil spirit of a doll that’s also haunting the house (yes this is a double haunting, stay with me here) to blackmail the Parks—who by now are so Forthy they believe they have always lived there—into leaving.

Meanwhile the vacationing Forths, released from all agency, responsibility, and idiosyncrasy, are having the time of their lives lolling around a tropical paradise like normal people until the moment the Parks walk out their door back home. The house, Sauron-like, instantly locates and locks on to them, and here we are.

But hey. I understand Sally’s panic at returning to her pinched, neurotic life. I mean who would want to live for even a minute in that lady’s head, amirite? The puzzle is Ted: as the house slips its evil tendrils back into his consciousness, he should be manically nattering “Let’s play Tenet Monopoly” or announcer-voicing “It’s time for the Star Wars Christmas Special.” But instead he deadpans his home maintenance to-do list, as though he and the house have somehow fallen symbiotically into cahoots. What, I wonder, will Ted demand from his house-accomplice in exchange for that sweet coat of fresh blacktop?

Watch out, Sally.

The Phantom, 8/6/23

Josh may want to wrap up the current Phantom Multiverse of Mozz storyline, but I remain all in. Especially since the Sunday strip has become a sort of sidequel to the dailies, and double especially because it features Patrolwoman Hawa Aguda, my #1 non-Savarna Phantom crush object.

But first, my sincere compliments to author Tony DePaul for revisiting the Mina Braun story the past few months of Sundays. Mina is a talented and pretty “scholar/adventurer” who fell in love with the Phantom after a bout of traumatic scholar-adventuring way back in 2005. To erase her trauma and untangle his relationships, the Phantom had Guran dose her with Bandar amnesia powder—the same thing he did to spunky reporter Lara Bell in 2014 to protect the secrets of the Phantom Cave.

In this year’s Sunday strips, we see Mina again, outside the Domain of the Almost Humans (who are somehow not pluggers), and learn that Guran’s dose fucked up her life. Tormented by dreams and half-memories, thought a madwoman, and with her career in ruins, she found her way back to rediscover her past and resume her scientific work alone. Mrs. Phantom Diana Palmer speaks for readers in calling Mina’s treatment—at her husband’s command—”inhumane.” Gracefully done, Mr. DePaul.

In today‘s strip, ex-amnesiac John X (the Phantom) returns to Jungle Patrol HQ after the events at Gravelines Prison covered in the daily strip. But Hawa’s congratulations seem off: it was the Phantom, not John X, who liberated Gravelines. Somebody is having trouble keeping his aliases straight. (“Um, lessee—Walker: sunglasses, fedora, no beard; John X: sunglasses, ball cap, beard; Unknown Commander: secret mailbox, spooky handwriting …”).

Gosh, that’s a long one. Back to wisecracks and cheap shots tomorrow, I promise!

—Uncle Lumpy