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I wrote a novel called The Enthusiast, and you can buy it! If you like this blog, I think you’ll dig it. Check out the first chapter, then buy:

• The hardcover or softcover edition for $25 or $15
• The ebook edition for $8, which includes files for all devices
• And if the mood strikes, you can put some money in my tip jar

This is probably the last day you can order it and be sure it’ll arrive in time for Christmas, so get those orders in soon. Thank you very much!

Momma, 12/18/15

I love that Momma is getting eye-poppingly furious about Francis’s inadequacies while she’s reading the newspaper, which is presumably full of material not all related to her youngest son’s employment or marital status. I’m genuinely curious as to what triggered this episode. “Terrorists … murderers … corrupt politicians … and almost all of them have jobs and families! How dare Francis do this to me? How dare he?”

Crankshaft, 12/18/15

Did you want to spend the weekend thinking about Crankshaft’s painfully swollen anus? Well, too bad, because now you’re going to anyway!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/18/15

Mary Beth is sad that her little brother is already absorbing and conforming to the particularly toxic construct of masculinity that prevails in Hootin’ Holler.

Six Chix, 12/18/15

Hmm, how can we reboot the Santa mythos to make it more in tune with today’s audiences? Add an elf who gets the job done by just straight-up murdering people? OK!

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The Phantom, 12/1/15

Whoa, all this time the Phantom has been trying to bully his son into heroism and suggesting he should go to Tibet for a years-long monastery education, like Phantoms past, but it turns out he spent his youth at some fancy New York boarding school! I don’t actually care about that one way or the other; I mostly am amused by the fact that (a) the Ghost Who Feels A Need To Project Patriarchal Authority sits on his massive Skull Throne when having family discussions and (b) has Box 7 at the Mawitaan post office. I mean, he’s a series of men who’ve been pretending to be the same deathless hero for multiple centuries. Who do you suppose got boxes 1 through 6? How many immortal ghosts can one mid-sized African republic support?

Six Chix, 12/1/15

Wait, people know this poem is about fighting off inevitable death, right. OBVIOUSLY THE CAT DOESN’T WANT TO GO OUT AT NIGHT, IT WILL GET HIT BY A CAR OR EATEN BY A COYOTE, WHO EVEN PUTS THEIR CAT OUT AT NIGHT ANYMORE, STOP MAKING GRIM POETRY JOKES ABOUT DYING CATS YOU MONSTER

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/8/15

Fun news! The current creative team behind Barney Google and Snuffy Smith has decided to dip into the strip’s long history and bring us a long-forgotten character: Granny Creeps, a black-clad crone who lives in a cave and performs mountain folk magic for community residents. This might give rise to intriguing plotlines about the very deep persistence of pre-Christian belief systems in rural, isolated communities, but as the punchline of today’s strip makes clear, Granny Creeps is as much a grifter and fraud as Hootin’ Holler’s supposed champion of monotheism.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/8/15

Hooray! Milton Avery, who is in fact ill, with debilitating dementia, of the sort that would prevent him from running a company, has managed to hold it together for the length of a board meeting, so he and his wife, who has no professional background in aerospace or spy satellites or lenses or whatever it is this company does, will continue to run it, rather than this nice Indian man who probably has some interesting ideas about new directions for the company and would at least carry on the tradition of cricket fandom in the corporate boardroom. Along the way, Milton has publicly humiliated his son, who has done nothing throughout this process but tell the truth about his father’s increasing incapacity and look out for the best interest of the company’s shareholders. Haha, remember Hugh’s last storyline, when everyone tried to gaslight him when he realized they were, in actuality, conspiring against him? Remember how his dad has been a monster to him for his entire life? Remember how he’s the bad guy in this storyline, for some reason?

Six Chix, 11/8/15

hey lady

EVERYONE CAN SEE AND HEAR YOU, NOT JUST THE DRONE