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My novel, The Enthusiast, is available for purchase! 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

Order soon to get yours in time for Christmas. Thank you very much!

Gil Thorp, 12/17/15

Oh man, the ending of this Gil Thorp storyline is probably one of the most disappointing in recent memory, and that’s saying something! Basically Gil yelled at Holly for making the kids feel bad and Holly closed down the production and sent all the reality show people home. It was both anticlimactic and unrealistic, in that whatever line Holly crossed didn’t seem that much worse than all the other lines she crossed, and and also in that Holly seemed to think that she would be able to work in her industry again after essentially shutting down an entire TV show — which, let’s not forget, was already being broadcast and so probably had several more episodes paid for, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But anyway, actresses, a bunch of liars, amiright? That’s what the TV executives scrambling to fill the hole Welcome Back Carter left in their schedules are thinking, anyway.

Shoe, 12/17/15

The Patented Shoe Heavy Eyelids of Ennui have never been more heartbreaking than they are here. This comic just consists of a television set delivering a joke that people have been telling each other and not laughing at for years, and the Perfesser wants no part of it. He refuses entirely to participate in it. You can see that between panels one and two his wings have slipped off the chair’s armrests and he’s slouched even further down into the cushions. “This is what it’s come to?” he asks us, silently. “No. No more. I want to die.”

B.C., 12/17/15

Hey, kids! Remember Rage Comics, which were popular on 4chan and Reddit around, like, 2009-ish? Well, one of the Rage Comics characters is in a newspaper comic strip! This certainly means, uh, something about something, that’s for sure.

Post Content

My novel, The Enthusiast, is available for purchase! 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

Order soon to get yours in time for Christmas. Thank you very much!

Judge Parker, 12/16/15

I don’t know why, but I can’t stop giggling at the phrase “died tragically in a Mexican jungle.” I know there are several noncontiguous rainforest areas in Mexico, but “a Mexican jungle” just sounds hilariously cagey. “You know, one of the jungles they have down there. Whatever the most murder-y jungle is, I forget the name. Probably it’s in Spanish or Mayan or something. The important thing is that he’s dead, and not at all living in our newly fortified guesthouse, OK?”

Momma, 12/16/15

I also can’t stop giggling at today’s Momma, mostly the part where Jim is erotically fixated on Tonya’s sexy, frilly hemline. Jim seems to like a gal who shows some calf, MaryLou, so you shouldn’t be dressing in plaid pants like some kind of prude if you want to maintain “squatter’s rights.” You know, squatter’s rights? Like, sex … squatting? Is that a thing? Distasteful as this is, at least this strip has stumbled away from accidental incest jokes.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/16/15

I think when Mason Jarr was first introduced as a character, back when they were going to make Les’s Lisa book into a terrible made-for-cable movie, he was presented as some dumb washed-up actor, but then he stuck around and generally became more sympathetic and also was supposed to have a somewhat higher-profiled career, I think? Anyway, that career is now over because he’s going to move to a depressing, economically dead town in Ohio with his wife! Funky and Holly are 100% correct to be completely gobsmacked by this.

Crankshaft, 12/16/15

Meanwhile, over in the “fun” Funkyverse strip, Crankshaft is supplementing his meager pay with a Santa Claus gig, and he has a tech-savvy elf named … Twitter! Get it, Twitter? The same name as the popular Internet website? Mercy!

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Hello, everybody! Remember three and a half years ago, when I had a Kickstarter to fund The Enthusiast, a novel I wanted to write? Remember how I promised it’d be done in like 18 months, and then that didn’t happen, and then I didn’t talk about it here or anywhere else for a long time, and then all of the sudden four months ago I started talking about it again and couldn’t stop talking about it, and you were like, “Jeez, Josh, when can I buy this thing already?” Well, good news: you can buy this thing already. The book is about trains, soap opera comics, and a stealth marketing agency that infiltrates groups of enthusiasts, online and in real life, to try to sell things for their clients. I’m very proud of how it turned out and am excited for you to read it. If you like this blog, you’ll probably enjoy it.

• You can buy the hardback version for $25 or the softcover version for $15 over at TopatoCo. Only a limited number of hardbacks are available, so act fast!
• You can buy the ebook edition for $8. This is a DRM-free bundle that includes Mobi (for Kindle), EPUB (for everybody else), and PDF (for any device) files.

The printing process came down to the wire in December, so if you want to give a copy of this book as a gift, you need to buy now! to get it by Christmas. Here’s a handy chart with info on shipping times from TopatoCo, the people who are doing the shipping. (If you buy the ebook edition, you can download it immediately after purchasing it, obviously.)

If you’d like to get a sense of the book before you decide to buy it, I’ve put the opening chapter up on Medium, and you can listen to me read chapter three on the Catapult podcast. You can also read this extremely positive review from Gary Tyrrell, creator of the Fleen webcomics blog.

And, finally, I’ve decided not to run my usual fall fundraiser this year in order to focus more on promoting my book. But if the mood strikes, you can always throw a few bucks in my tip jar, in addition to/instead of buying the novel. Thanks so much!