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Hagar the Horrible, 4/1/21

Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone! Say, were you concerned that the creative team behind today’s Hagar the Horrible believed that an olive tree might realistically grow out of an olive left floating in a martini glass over a single evening? Well, rest assured: that little sign being held by a tentacle is here to let you know that this is just a seasonally appropriate jest, and we’ll be getting back to this strip’s ultra-realistic medieval Norse setting tomorrow. (The creative team also knows that squid and octopuses do not hold signs this way; the tentacle is itself a secondary April Fool’s joke.)

Crankshaft, 4/1/21

These two twins have been volunteering to help Lillian with the unpermitted bookstore she runs over her garage for years now, and they’ve finally won her trust enough that they can start scamming her. And good for them!

Mary Worth, 4/1/21

Well, now that we’ve established that dogs are good, I guess we can finally move forward to the next storyline, and … OH NO SAUL DID YOU LET HER SEE A HEADLESS BESUITED MANNEQUIN, this is going to trigger another panic attack and at least another six weeks of this plotline, please, we had almost made it out of this one

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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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