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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for blogging to go from being a new, weird, mysterious thing to being something that now seems hopelessly quaint and outdated, for instance.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!

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Let us have no delay! Let us have the comment of the week!

“Poor young’uns! Their tongues, once a vivid fire engine red, are now the color of a pencil eraser. They been eatin’ too much roadkill, which isn’t providing some vital nutrient. Iron, maybe? Vitamin K? Look, I’m not a doctor. But I do know this don’t look right.” –made of wince

And the hilarious runners up! Let us have those too!

“You can tell that Olive’s parents are weird and distant because they don’t say goodbye to her as she leaves, they ‘observe’ her. ‘June 22, 10:24 AM: Subject is leaving the apartment to prepare baked goods with the elderly woman next door. Will copulate until she returns.'” –pugfuggly

“It actually makes sense that Lulu would recognize the ring Patty is wearing across the restaurant, since a lynx has excellent eyesight for hunting. What makes less sense is for a lynx to have fingers — but that’s life among grotesquely anthropomorphized animals!” –BigTed

Shoe: “BREAKER BREAKER THIS JUST IN BIRDS HAVE BELLY BUTTONS SUCK IT DARWIN” –pastordan

“Shouldn’t Taurus blow his hippo whistle?” –Ned Ryerson

“I’m hoping that the all-night conversation between Abbott and the Gardias eventually turned to speculation about the sequel to The Chambers Affair and Randy and April come down to breakfast to find Alan seated at a typewriter, at gunpoint. These guys aren’t going to put up with any George R.R. Martin shit.” –cheech wizard

“You heard it here first, folks — even when he’s being hailed as the greatest artist of his generation, literally nobody could bring themselves to call Les ‘entertaining.'” –The Ben

“You’ve wasted your time creating a beautiful work of art, and you have my sympathy and pity for that. Anyway, enough business. Let’s kiss these mirrors while weeping openly. My secretary will give you some paper and a quill pen if you’d like to write poetry with your tears.” –Dan

“Nooo!!! This will just allow Les to come out with a ‘Directors Cut’ version of Lisa’s Story. Seemingly never ending, it will be like Das Boot with cancer.” –Mikey

“Chip gave his emoticon five chins, to emphasize that Ms. Blips has none. Cruel, really. ” –hogenmogen

“At that moment, Les had an epiphany. He knew now that there was only one way that Lisa’s Story would ever be produced. The answer was right in front of him. The words formed on his lips before he had time to regret them, and regret he almost certainly would: ‘What if I made Lisa into a cat?’ There was a pregnant pause. ‘And she gets better,’ he added mournfully.” –Guts Dozier

“Throwing a fiery torch into the mouth of any animal is a good way to defeat it. That’s just basic Dungeon Master knowledge. As always, be wary of fire-based elemental creatures though, because you’d then actually grant them anywhere from +3 to +7 health.” –Chareth Cutestory

“I really hope this path toward even more amped-up bad-assery works its way into Mark Trail’s writing, spawning a new genre of full-immersion gonzo-wildlife journalism. ‘Maw of Flaming Death’ will only be the start. Once he goes full-on Dark Mark, I expect to see such feature articles as ‘Black Blood, White Gold: My Year As An Ivory Poacher,’ ‘The Bushmeat Diaries’ and ‘IT IS RUSTY! New Directions in Cryptozoology'” –Voyage of the Oversnark

“‘I don’t understand any of this, Carol!’ It’s very simple, first there was an accident with a deer, and then you decided to take a faun back to the apartment, and then presumably got tired of deer shit covering your floor and bedding, so rather than calling an animal rehab facility, you took it out to a sketchy vet, who decided to heal your deep psychological problems by making you clean up animal shit without pay possibly as some sort of twisted BDSM farm fetish on his part, at which point his ‘girlfriend’ showed up and he ran off while she went shopping and got disgusted by people trying to be polite and make small talk with her … and look, I’m pretty sure this all ends with the ‘doctor’ and his ‘girlfriend’ turning you into a skin suit or a human centipede or something that will eventually make its way into a Hillbilly Serial Killer Art display in Margo’s gallery.” –Comrade Dread

“Thanks a LOT, Mark — hippos hate the taste of human flesh. Now with that hippo’s taste buds burned away there will be no stopping the blood rampage.” –Patrick

“The last two panels look like those computer-aged photos of kidnapping victims. ‘We think she may have started wearing headbands in captivity.'” –Joe Blevins

“I’m a little concerned that Jughaid brought his little friend out for a poetry recital on a craggy, black-rock precipice out over the tree-lined rocks below. I’m a little set back that all the waggle-tongue shenanigans in Hoot’n Holler are bracketed by operatic declarations of love in the shadow of Chernabog, Great Demon of Bald Mountain.” –Black Drazon

“The keys open every bathroom in the city, but they won’t open the door on this chamber they’ve trapped us in. This white anechoic chamber. We can only hear ourselves. Even if we’re silent, we’ll hear each other’s heartbeats. Until we’re driven mad by the constant thumping and kill each other, finally alone in silence. And then the lone survivor will realize she can still hear a heartbeat, her own. This is the just punishment for our crimes.” –Voshkod

“Is Jughaid revealing the continuing oral traditions of Hootin’ Holler? Perhaps Robert Burns’ song ‘A Red, Red Rose’ travelled a long voyage from his native Scotland to the Americas, deep into the mountains. The new settlers, versed in their motherland’s art, passed along from generation to generation this folk song, which now became the crooning suitor’s love call, attracting the most available cousin with the least standards.” –sporknpork

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! If you’d like to buy advertising on the site, you can do so on a CPM basis through BuySellAds. To find out more, you can go to my BuySellAds page or just click here.

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It is Friday, and therefore time for your comment of the week!

“Today’s Mark Trail really captures why the Victorian explorers called Africa ‘the Bright Continent.’ As Livingstone wrote in his journals, as he travelled up the River Zambezi into the heart of whiteness: ‘All around us, scorching white light. So bright, it washes away the background. People just feet away seem little more than colorless shadows.'” –Voshkod

And your very funny runners up!

“Ha, Billy *did* include ‘DISA POINT’, eerily foreshadowing our reactions.” –grayangora

“Loretta feels nothing but terror at Leroy’s desire to become a Vulcan. Having to have sex with him every seven years would be far too frequent.” –Christopher

“‘Is she for real?’ That’s a rather mild reaction to being confronted with your palette-swapped doppelgänger, but Apartment 3-G is all about the mild reactions.” –TheDiva

“Is Happiness Falls an Old Order Mennonite community? I’m wondering if that might explain why Jack rode off on a horse (without a cell phone) and no woman in town ever bares any neckline below her clavicle. God willing, the next storyline will send Margo to South Padre Island.” –Oregonian

“Well, the full-front mugshot is taken care of. Now for a profile shot, and then the cops will be all prepared once Sarah’s inevitable serial killing spree is launched.” –dmsilev

“Greetings, little girl. I am not an angel. I am a fairy! See how I wave! I am the Heroin Fairy and I was on my way to Tommy’s room when I walked into yours by accident! I guess that’s why they say you shouldn’t sample your own sales, huh? Ha-Ha! But seriously little girl, I couldn’t help noticing that you bear a strong resemblance to a tween Rosie O’Donnell. Sturdy with a good constitution! And I hear your going back to New York City soon, So how would you like to be the Heroin Fairy’s special ‘drug mule’ — I mean ‘helper’. How many balloons do you think you can swallow comfortably?” –gelded wildebeeste

“I love how unabashedly, psychotically enthusiastic Olive is about receiving direct contact with a literal agent of the divine. In the the Bible, angels generally preface their appearances with some variant of ‘Be Not Afraid…’, presumably because a being formed from pure holy radiance is pretty damn scary. But Olive just looks at the inexplicably grandmotherly visage suffused with God’s glory (she imagines the divine in Mary’s image?) with the same expression of generic excitement she directed at the flower fairies, the ripples of the Charterstone pool, and Mary’s unidentifiable contribution to the potluck. What I’m saying is that we’re actually dealing with a Rex Morgan storyline about the dangers of over-medicating kids.” –Master Softheart

“Oh, right. Like the Queen of Hurleyburg would reign in a little black cocktail dress and heels. That is so unrealistic: everyone knows that get-up is only for a secretary on a military base.” –Dr. Mabuse

“If you want your team to have better pitching strength, you should add the knuckleball to your bag of tricks. Having trouble perfecting the knuckleball? Try removing a finger or two so you have a large knuckle stump like the kid in panel two.” –Chareth Cutestory

“OK, what the fuck am I looking at in panel one of today’s Mary Worth? It looks like the goateed dad is the subject of a modern Salvador Dali surrealist project, in Dali’s common theme of sleep and unconsciousness. He holds the cup unknowingly to his lips, with no hands; even in his waking hours, he is only present in a crude state of physical flesh, without mentally being present. Truly a metaphor for all of us who slog through the endless repetition of 9-5 white collar work.” –HAnzMFG

“‘Uncle Cosmo, what was life like back before television?’ ‘Cant … talk … now … watching … butter.'” –Red Greenback

“The angel also warned me not to run with scissors, and that I should update my vaccinations before the next school year. He was kind of a drag, actually.” –pugfuggly

“Flower fairies? Sure. Big-ass Angel O’Premonition? You bet. But if Wilbur Weston saves this girl from drowning I am done with this strip. Suspension of disbelief is great, but there is a line.” –Uncle Lumpy

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! If you’d like to buy advertising on the site, you can do so on a CPM basis through BuySellAds. To find out more, you can go to my BuySellAds page or just click here.