Archive: metaposts

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A few weeks after I started out this blog, readers pointed me in the direction of a similar project that I had never seen before: Funny Paper, a hilarious feature that had run on the Web site of my own fair city’s weekly City Paper. Funny Paper’s tagline was “We read the comics so you don’t have to.” This was remarkably similar to the title of my blog, but since Funny Paper seemed to have stopped publishing around six months before I began my own endeavor, I figured the coincidence didn’t matter much. Well, last week I got an email from the writers of Funny Paper, saying that they felt rather proprietary about the phrase, and that their column wasn’t defunct, only “on hiatus.” So, since they were first and all, I have now changed names. Behold, the Comics Curmudgeon! You will now be able to access this blog at comicscurmudgeon.com. Of course, the joshreads.com address will still work, since nobody (myself included) can spell “curmudgeon” consistently.

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If there’s one thing I’m always ready to do, it’s take credit. Thus, I don’t know for sure that my pleas for justice — and the resulting outpouring of wrath on the part of IRTCSYDHT readers — had anything to do with the Baltimore Sun’s decision to restore Apartment 3-G and The Phantom to their rightful place on the funny pages as of today, but I’m going to choose to believe that they did. Of course, it saddens me that poor dear Mary Worth and fightin’ Mark Trail are still in exile, but we must take what we can get.

Meanwhile, this blog has seen a massive upswing in traffic in the past seven days or so. Last week I was linked to by The Morning News and Bookslut. This apparently brought me to the attention of the mainstream media, as I in short order received links from pop culture blogs at the Houston Chronicle, Masslive, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. Then today all hell really broke loose as I attracted the notice of the good people at Metafilter. I’m a huge egotist, so I love the attention, but my bandwidth bills are climbing rapidly — I had more visitors in January 17 than I did in all of December. [This sentence redacted in accordance with the Google terms of service.] And keep an eye out for an exciting development that will be arriving here in the not-so-distant future: IRTCSYDHT-branded merchandise!

I’ve been so slack on doing linkbacks, and have built up so many here, that I’m afraid I’m only going to pick some arbitrary highlights; apologies if I skip your fine blog or home page. But I must give special props to Killinki (because it’s in Finnish, or possibly Estonian), Dukakis Hugging Moon Maiden (who proposed marriage to me), Comics Worth Reading, The Official Mark Trail WHAT TH’ Page, Andertoons Blog, and The Whiteboard (the last two are both real live cartoonists!). Also worth noting is some kind of “Hottest Cartoon Women” contest over at Wanderlist.com, which links to my Blondie archive to illustrate Mrs. Bumstead’s ample charms. Irony, people, you must learn to comprehend irony.

And what rambling metapost would be complete without some amusing and alarming search terms? From Google, we have “keeping a man satisfied” and “‘sally forth’ horrible” (they said it, not me); from Google Italy we have “inuit big tits,” and from Google Japan we have “mustache cat.” Moving down the evolutionary ladder, at AOLSearch we have “WOMAN RAPED BY ALIANS” (you people disgust me, and so does your spelling). And finally, from the Wal-Mart Connect search, we have “tijuana bibles snuffy smith.” Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Wal-Mart has a search engine?” Well, I have no explanation for that, but I can provide an answer to your next question: “What’s a Tijuana bible?” In a comment on an older post that you may not have seen, faithful reader LabRat explains all: “Back in the thirties and forties when Blondie was in its heyday, a popular form of pornography was dirty comic books, often featuring popular comic characters like Popeye or Minnie Mouse. They’re called ‘Tijuana Bibles’ if you feel like Googling it for retro-flavored trauma. Blondie Bumstead almost certainly had her turn in one or two.” The fact that anyone wants to see bootleg pornography based on the characters in Snuffy Smith — and that those people are using Wal-Mart for their search engine needs — provides such an obvious set-up for cruel commentary that I can’t even bring myself to follow through on it.

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My fiancée is in the sex ed biz, and this week she returned from a visit to a health center north of the Mason-Dixon line with this intriguing artifact.

OK, so I understand that there are very few male characters in Luann who aren’t either related to Luann or involved in some sort of tiresome romantic situation with her. And obviously her make-out session with Aaron marks all this as outside the continuity of the strip. But still, she’s talking about dealing with sexual pressure with … TJ? TJ the schemer? TJ the scammer? TJ, whose every appearance in the strip heralds the inevitable entanglement of Brad in some awful web of deceit? The TJ I know would be turning this situation to his advantage and be attempting to shepherd Luann into the back seat of his car by the end of the pamphlet.

On the other hand, the TJ I know is also white. At first, I thought that perhaps I had never seen him in a Sunday strip before; but you know, it’s pretty obvious that Delta is black even in the dailies. Maybe it’s one of those parallel universe things: evil Spock has a beard, good Spock is clean shaven; evil TJ is white, good TJ is black.

My only comment on the content of this handout is that I think a “Waiting Is Sexy” t-shirt may send out some mixed messages. Waiting is many things, many of them positive, but “sexy” is not one of them, particularly if you’re a teenager. I can barely handle the three minutes of waiting involved in microwaving a frozen pizza pocket, and I’m 30. Also, I find it interesting that Greg Evans borrowed a trope from Mark Trail and featured some animal-closeup panels while humans converse offstage. Presumably this is because the only thing duller than drawing two people walking and talking is drawing two people walking and talking about not having sex.