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Baby Blues, 3/31/21

Look, as a guy with a Gen X beard situation myself (though I finally ditched the goatee for the full mountain man during the quar), I get why it’s absolutely perfect for “Good Ol’ Stan,” Darryl’s douchey college pal whose visit Wanda has been dreading all week, to have a prominent and douchey beard when he finally makes his first on-panel appearance. I won’t even quibble with the individual decisions to have his hair be light brown, to have him wearing a mask, and to have Darryl’s underpants tucked under the beard in the aftermath of the epic wedgie he’s received. But taken together? To produce what appears to be a wavy light brown stain near the waistband of Darryl’s tighty-whities? That’s just bad decision making and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Hi and Lois, 3/31/21

Look, all you people who call Hi and Lois “unfit parents” just because they leave their infant unsupervised, both indoors and outdoors, for hours at a time: would an unfit parent bother to carefully place that infant several inches into the shade, which is a great place to leave her for several more hours, since we all know that shade remains in the same place over the course of the day? Check and mate, haters!

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Hello all! I have some news that a certain subset of you may find exciting! We all know that it can be difficult to keep up with your favorite websites today, what with the death of Google Reader and social networks’ algorithmic feeds sometimes hiding the daily links. Well, if you’re tired of missing your daily Comics Curmudgeon post, and want the burden of remembering to type “josh reads dot com” into your browser lifted, perhaps you would like to subscribe to my newsletter? Like, literally, subscribe to my newsletter! For a mere $3 a month, you can get a banner-ad free version of each day’s post emailed to you every morning. Just fill in your email and payment info below! UPDATE: The thing that was making this not work has now been fixed, so if you tried it once and it didn’t work, give it another shot!

(Newsletter delivery infrastructure is taken care of by Buttondown, which handles payments in conjunction with Stripe. See the privacy policy for more details.)

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Please, another money making scheme?” Well, yes, yes it is. But I hope it’s a scheme that provides something that you want! Email newsletters are having something of a renaissance these days as various factors make it harder actually get web content you want on the regular, so if you’re sad about missing my posts sometimes and don’t want to deal with ads, this might be a good option for you. It’s the same price as being a Website Subscriber, which gets you an ad-free version of the website, if that’s more your jam!

It’s possible that this newsletter is a thing that’s nobody’s jam, and that’s OK! If I don’t get a critical mass of people signing up for it, I may cancel the experiment after a couple months. (Anyone who has signed up for it will be refunded in full at that point, so if you’re at all interested, you’ve got nothing to lose!)

I do want to assure you that the main website will always remain free of charge for as long as I produce it, and the ads upon it will not go beyond the industry standard for annoying, by which I mostly mean they won’t play audio without your consent. But if you do want to pay for some extras, well, I’ve got a couple ways you can do that now. And if you don’t want to sign up for a subscription but just want to throw a little cash my way, well, I’ve got ways you can do that too.

Also, something else that’s free: I’m going to be on What’s Going On, a free Twitch comedy panel show, tonight at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern. Come check it out!

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Dennis the Menace, 3/30/21

This is one of those comics where I feel like the joke is convoluted enough that I have to reason it out from first principles. Like, we know Mr. Wilson doesn’t have any friends — we know this with absolute certainty — so I guess the book he’s going through is supposed to be the White Pages, rather than a particularly thick personal address book, even though I’m pretty sure they stopped publishing the White Pages years ago and also the DIRECTORY heading never appeared at the top of the page in the middle of the book for whatever reason. Anyway, who do you think he’s calling? Given that Dennis has upgraded his menacing from “dropping by to annoy Mr. Wilson” to “dropping by with a friend to gawk at Mr. Wilson like he’s an animal at the zoo,” I certainly hope that it’s finally Child Protective Services.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/30/21

I guess the new hilarious “Harry Dinkle has blood running down his face” running gag comes from him biting his tongue when his god-like talent as a band director isn’t recognized by the ladies of this church, who live in a different town from where he taught high school and have literally no reason to know anything about him. That said, the funnier explanation would be that his face is starting to crack due to the pressure put on it by wild swings in expressions like the one we see between panels two and three, and pretty soon it’s going to just slide off the front of his head altogether.

Family Circus, 3/30/21

You may think Big Daddy Keane’s little smile here is cruel, but you have to understand that the minute Billy is large and/or skilled enough to defeat him in single combat, his reign as head of the household — and his life — are over. That day is coming, but it hasn’t come yet, Billy. Not quite yet.