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Ugggh, everybody, much as sorting through all these plots has been a genuine joy of (re)discovery, it’s also meant some hard choices, and in going back over the 2007-08 blog year, I had an extremely hard time even cutting things back to a winner and three runners up. I could not ignore, for instance, the time that Mary Worth’s boyfriend Jeff’s son Drew “Dr. McHottie” Corey tried to simultaneously romance Wilbur’s daughter Dawn and Mary meddlee Vera, with predictably violent results:

Later, he was forced to admit that Mary and Jeff represented what true love was all about, which, barf.

Over in Gil Thorp, Coach Kaz went on an exciting summer adventure as an undercover detective in the entourage of Gail Martin, the “rock and roll Carole King” and performer of the smash hit “Tarzana Nights.” Kaz punched some dude in the brain and figured out who the rat in Gail’s entourage was (it turned out to be her drummer, aka Burnout Ben Franklin).

And let’s not forget the time that Abbey was secretly fed pot brownies, by her kindly elderly pot-growing next-door neighbors, and then she got super high and she and Sam tried to have sex but she passed out first and this image was involved and it was the worst kind of surreal nightmare.

But when it came to hard-hitting stories about drugs and how they are bad, the winner was definitely Apartment 3-G, which spent much of the year on the saga of Lu Ann’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend Alan, who was addicted to … drugs, of some kind, it was “rock” or “dope” or something, and he got it from “Jones,” his vest-wearing beatnik dealer and eventually tried becoming a dealer himself, but the important thing is that this plot gifted us with some of the dorkiest drug talk ever committed to print. For instance: how does dope make you feel? Does it make you feel super?

How much would you say drugs cost you? Just a part of your paycheck, or most of it, maybe?

When you’re super into dope, are there things other than getting high that you care about?

And, finally, when you’re really worked up about drugs, what is it that can make you calm down?

Alan was eventually gunned down by this crazed bald drug fiend, so, you know, drugs are bad and you should not do them, no matter how sexy Judge Parker makes them seem, the end.

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2006-07 was quite the year in the soaps, guys. Mark Trail encountered a tame bear who couldn’t understand your hostility towards her, which I immortalized in t-shirt form. Later, Mark punched a man’s beard off.

In Gil Thorp, one of Gil’s student athletes accidentally cut his own leg off with a chainsaw. In the spring, a weird lonely old man wandered onto Milford High’s grounds, who helped coach the baseball team and claimed to have played in the Negro Leagues and insisted on being called by a funny nickname.

Turns out he was a fraud, and Gil knew about it but never said anything because he was doing Gil’s job for free so why rock the boat?

Also, in Judge Parker, a substitute butler from a temp agency forced some French punk rockers to strip to their underwear at gunpoint. I swear I didn’t make a single word in that sentence up.

But year three of my blog, without question, belonged to Aldo Kelrast, the man whose name was an anagram for “stalker” because he stalked Mary Worth, stalked her from the first moment he saw her.

Mary gave Aldo the cold shoulder pretty much right away, which didn’t stop him from popping up unexpectedly.

Aldo proved wholly unable to grasp the concept of consent, even when Mary used barbarous foreign tongues to express her disinterest.

Mary eventually had no choice but to arrange an intervention for Aldo, if any group of people brought together in one room to yell at someone counts as an “intervention.” Aldo reacted as most would: by going directly to a liquor store and driving over a cliff to his death. His pudgy, Captain Kangaroo-esque corpse was left in a pile of mangled steel.

This was a huge deal. People went nuts! My blog traffic was off the charts! There was coverage on CNN! There were tribute videos!

Later, Mary and her friends went to his funeral, to make sure he was really dead, and to gloat. It was awkward and fantastic. Cold justice had been meted out, and Mary was victorious. Farewell, Aldo: you didn’t deserve to die, but you shouldn’t have gone around stalking people either.

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Nine years and fifty weeks ago, a young man living in Baltimore, Maryland, spent too much of every morning annoying his then-fiancée with jokes about the soap opera comic strips that he read in the physical newspaper like some sort of primitive cave-man. After following up a Mary Worth-themed breakfast bon mot with an idle boast to start a comics-related blog one too many times, that young man was told by his fiancée that he had to put up or shut up about it. And so he started “I Read The Comics So You Don’t Have To,” grabbing the URL joshreads.blogspot.com only because other variations on the title were already taken. That young man, as you might have guessed, was me. The first post went up on July 11, 2004; in October I moved the site to my own WordPress URL, and in January 2005 I change the name to the Comics Curmudgeon, and since then it’s been smooth sailing.

Ten years is a long time, especially on the Internet! It’s long enough for blogging to go from being a new, weird, mysterious thing to being something that now seems hopelessly quaint and outdated, for instance. It’s a good time to take stock and contemplate one’s life and career. For instance, here’s a couple big pieces of Josh-themed news:

• Remember that book I Kickstarted, two years ago, which is now many months overdue? The writing part is a-l-m-o-s-t done. I have a hard self-imposed deadline to get it into the hands of my copy editor by the end of July, which should mean physical books can get into the hands of readers by the end of the year. That deadline is hard because…
• …Amber and I will be moving to Los Angeles in September, with the goal of me Making It in Comedy Entertainment in some fashion. So if you live in LA and work in Real Professional Comedy in some capacity — TV, movies, standup, whatever — and you enjoy my blog and always thought “Gee, it’s too bad that guy lives in Baltimore,” well, now’s your chance to hit me up! Even if you don’t have the standard rich and famous contract for me to sign, I’d love to buy you lunch and pick your brain. Also, we’ll be there in early August to find an apartment, so if you know of a two-bedroom for rent in Silver Lake or its various adjacent neighborhoods, let me know! Haven’t you always wanted to have the Comics Curmudgeon living in your pool-house, Kato Kaelin style? Email me at bio at jfruh dot com if you want to discuss matters Los Angeles!

All that having been said, blogging can happen from anywhere, and the soap opera strips are available on the Internet, and so I will continue to make jokes about Mary Worth until the sun expands into a red giant and/or our consciousnesses are uploaded to computers with no need for “humor.” But still, ten years is a good time for some self-indulgent self-reflection, right? So for the next two weeks, I’ll be counting down my favorite soap opera plots from each of the last ten years, because the soaps are my lodestar, the reason I got into the comics-mocking game in the first place. Those of you who’ve been around for the whole run can join me in some nostalgia. More recent converts: you are in for the RIDE OF YOUR LIFE.

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The span from July 2004 through July 2005 was a magical year for the soaps, really, and it’s easy to see why I was convinced that this was a gimmick I could ride to Internet laffs glory forever. It was the year, for instance, that Margo in Apartment 3-G got kidnapped and forced to work in a garment sweatshop in New Jersey, and was subjected to this famous command:

It was also the year we learned that, no matter how square he may seem, Mark Trail knows what cocaine tastes like. (Later he was thrown to the sharks.)

But the soap-wise, the first year of this blog belonged to one man: Tommy the Tweaker.

Tommy was an extremely emo ex-con with big, big ideas of becoming a suburban meth dealer, years before Breaking Bad made meth all trendy. He had cool hair and great salesmanship, and when you took his meth, you got super high right away, or maybe almost died, which can be sort of the same thing?

Like all prophets, Tommy was unappreciated in his own time, by which I mean he was immediately arrested. He returned this year, and while that storyline was definitely a blast, it’s hard to overstate how much the fall of 2004 got me to fall in love with the soap opera comics as a medium, and to realize that curating Mary Worth was probably my destiny.

TOMORROW: 2005-06! It was a year of dognappers, sad bears, homeless basketball players, outsourced homework, sexy feederism, and golf-flirting, but: there can be only one winner!