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I would have completely forgotten if faithful reader Zorba the Geek hadn’t pointed it out, but today is in fact my second anniversary in the comics blogging biz. Yes, on July 11, 2004, I made my first blog post, about Non Sequitur of all things, though I didn’t unleash it on the world (by which I mean, I didn’t e-mail the URL to the handful of friends that I assumed would constitute my entire audience) until the end of that week. If you’d like to see this blog in embryonic form, check out these posts from that first week.

Over the last two years, my readership has grown way, way beyond that initial group of people, and one of the things that has encouraged me to keep going is the knowledge that you’re all out there, reading, laughing, and often topping me in the comments section and in the forum. You’re also incredibly nice and generous to me, and, apparently, often forward this URL to your friends. One of the nice things that happened to me today was a note from faithful reader Mooncity, creator the comic Autumn Lake, who was nice enough to work me into his comic today. Thanks Mooncity! Read and rejoice!

A couple of other readers saw my new sidebar picture from yesterday against a “green screen” (it’s just the wall of my office! our house is very colorful!) and puckishly put me into various odd situations. DCBirdblaster sent me to the United Airlines VIP lounge in Inchon Airport, S. Korea:

And Devil in the Drain helped me live out my longstanding fantasy vis-a-vis the Apartment 3-G girls:

(By the way, those are the original girls, from the ’60s, back when the strip had actual sex appeal. If you haven’t seen this this Website, from which the above graphic is derived, you are in for a shock.)

In other sidebar photo news, you may have already noticed the dynamic, prize-winning married duo of Lucy Van Pelt and Dr. Jeff Cory, showing off their spiffy new Comics Curmudgeon gear:

Join them today! Send those pics!

Finally, I leave you with two more blog finds. On the single-comic-blog front, there’s Joe Mathlete explains today’s Marmaduke in 500 words or less, which is pretty much what it says on the label, really, and is also frickin’ hilarious. And Livejournaler mia_d has this post, which is in and of itself a hilarous but perfectly natural reaction to the existence of They’ll Do It Every Time, but what really caught my eye was this comment from lostbirdfound, which revealed the following:

Jimmy Hatlo [the original TDIET artist] also did a strip called “Hatlo’s Inferno” which is basically “They’ll Do It Every Time”… in Hell. Needless to say, it rules.

Holy crap. Click here and here for more. I order you to find more of this for me.

Update: A Halto’s Inferno slideshow and an eBay auction of a classic Halto’s Inferno book (scroll down for a good “naughty damned nurse” cartoon). Thanks to bigoldgeek and DarkHorse02GT for the respective head’s ups. I think this strip achieves Outbursts of Everett True levels of horror and wonder.

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You’ve probably noticed the pictures of various cool, attractive people sporting Comics Curmudgeon gear in the sidebar just under the Amazon ad and thought to yourself, “I’d like to be one of those people, but I’m just not cool and/or attractive enough!” Well, here’s a shot in the arm for your self-esteem: you can be one of those people! All you have to do is (1) buy some Comics Curmudgeon gear, (2) take a picture of yourself wearing and/or drinking out of it, and (3) e-mail said picture to me. People have already taken step 1 in record numbers; those shirts and mugs should be arriving around now, so I order you to take steps 2 and 3 today!

As always, I lead by example. Check out my awesome new Margo Warhol t-shirt (art courtesy of David Willis):

“Hey, Josh,” you’re probably saying, “That’s pretty mercenary. Isn’t there some way for my picture to appear on this blog without me having to spend any money?” Of course there is. You could, say, pretend to be a cartoon character from a soap opera strip. Yes, the Finger Quotin’ Margo Lookalike Contest is over, but I want to emphasize that I am more than willing to give a platform to whatever wacko wants to pretend to be Margo Magee or the like. Why, here’s a picture recently sent to me by faithful reader MonkeyPants:

Now, you might be saying, “Hey, she’s not wearing a turtleneck!” But she used to work for King Features and actually edited Apartment 3-G for four years, so I think she knows a little bit more about what Margo would wear than you do.

I conclude this metapost by pointing out two more comics blogs that get more obsessive than even I could contemplate and focus their rage on a single strip: Permanent Monday, which is all about Garfield, and Dinette Set Deconstruction, which is about, well, the Dinette Set. Joy and Burl’s heads float quite creepily above the text in the latter.

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You know how it goes. You’re reading the comments on a blog that doesn’t have a thing to do about politics, when another commentor says something politcal that doesn’t match up with your worldview and OOO it makes me SO MAD and if nobody responds to him everyone will think he’s RIGHT and HE’LL WIN and so it’s PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO RESTRAIN MYSELF FROM WRITING A SCATHING TWELVE-PARAGRAPH REBUTTAL!

Well! Now, instead of putting that twelve-paragraph rebuttal in the comments section on the blog’s main page, you can say, “Prithee, sir! You have wounded the honor of my faction! I challenge you to a duel of wits in … the Cockpit!” And then everyone who’s interested can go over there and yell “Fight! Fight! Fight!” And everyone else can ignore it.

Yes, the Cockpit is a new section of the Comics Curmudgeon Community forums site. You need to register to post there if you don’t already have a forums account, but it’s free to do so. I’m not saying that anything political should be posted there, but if you find yourself getting into a heated back and forth with another poster — about politics or anything else, for that matter — then you should go over there to do it. Because if you don’t, you’ll find that the text of the posts that make up the argument on the main site will be magically replaced with a link to a thread over at the Cockpit, where said text will magically reappear. (And by “magically,” I mean “I’m going to do it.”) Feel free to bash your heads open to your heart’s content, all!