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Hello, friends! If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt a regular or semi-regular reader of this li’l website, the Comics Curmudgeon. I’m doing a redesign later this year — no major surgery, but it’s time for a facelift, particularly for the mobile site — and would like to get some data and feedback to guide me! If you would be so kind, click here to take the user survey I’ve come up with. Please note that this survey doesn’t collect any personal information that you don’t actively put into it, and I won’t share the results with anyone except the redesign team (which is me, Uncle Lumpy, and Adam Norwood). It shouldn’t take too long and it will really help me out. Thanks in advance!

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Gil Thorp, 9/20/16

hmm yes what have we here

looks like Milford football season is rolling into gear

we’ve got Gil testily sparring with Marty Moon, sure

and then the ritual Reciting of the Names and Positions, nice, right

and then WAIT WHAT THE HELL

THE OPENER AT OAKWOOD

WHERE IS THE BONFIRE????

EVERY YEAR WE GET A BONFIRE AND EVERY YEAR IT CLEANSES US

HOW DARE YOU SIR

HOW DARE YOU

Family Circus, 9/20/19

Big Daddy Keane’s hesitant little smile is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. “Wait, are they making fun of me? No, I think they like me. Yeah, I’m gonna go with that. They like me! I think.”

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/19/16

Just to prove to you the lengths I go to in order to make my silly jokes about comics on my blog, here are some fun facts I learned while researching today’s Hagar the Horrible:

• The common origin story of coffee cultivation — that an Ethiopian shepherd noticed goats getting jumpy when they ate certain berries — is probably a myth. The first written record of coffee being drunk comes from Yemen in the 1400s, which explains why there’s no coffee for Eddie to drink, five centuries earlier and thousands of miles to the north.
• Anxiety and worry are the end products of parallel linguistic evolution: both ultimately descend from words (in Latin and proto-German, respectively) that mean “to strangle.”

Anyway! I don’t know if those facts add up to much, except that maybe Eddie — who Hagar has already turned his back on in that final panel — has felt phantom hands around his throat for a long time, and it has nothing to do with caffeine withdrawal.

Gasoline Alley, 9/19/16

I’ve been reading the non-adventures of the chumps in Gasoline Alley for more than a decade and while I’m vaguely aware that they’re all part of a huge, sprawling family, I still couldn’t tell you how any of them are related to any of the other ones. Beardy Dude and Ranger Gal are thus connected by a tenuous web of kinship, though that didn’t come up when he guided her forest birth; it’s sort of coming out now, not that I can really follow what the hell’s going on in panel two. Are they visualizing … each other, but younger? Each visualizing his younger self? Why does the kid in the rightmost thought balloon have three legs? Why does he have three legs? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY DOES HE HAVE THREE LEGS

Slylock Fox, 9/19/16

I just want to point out that Slylock is a compulsive ratiocinator. Like, he does it to solve crimes when he doesn’t even need to. “So, I saw the whole thing go down with my own eyes, all you need to do is take down the information. The ape parked his car in the deale–” “IT’S THE ONE WITH THE LICENSE PLATES!!! Right? Right? I said it before you said it! IN YOUR FACE, RABBIT!”

Marvin, 9/19/16

Guys, it’s Monday, so I just want to leave you with an uplifting image: an infant with a thousand-mile stare, openly worrying that someday — maybe someday soon — he’ll become unmoored from any conventional system of morality and perpetrate unspeakable horrors. Let’s all have a super week!