Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out!
Gasoline Alley, 1/20/24
Longtime faithful readers know that in most of the strips I comment on here, there’s at least one character upon whom I wish every ill. In Gasoline Alley that’s obviously Slim, but I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the strip’s creators also love to torment him. Why else would his plan to murder teenagers with a meteorite go awry and his house get haunted by inane ghosts ? Anyway, you may remember the time he got an erotic concussion , and now we’re back to another unsettling tale of his place in our collective sexual dreamscape. His wife found a mysterious love note in his pocket that he doesn’t remember getting; could it be that Saint Agnes, who famously was to be married against her will and then punished for her Christianity by being sent to a brothel but God protected her by making her hair grow over her body and striking her would-be rapists dead, is telling Slim that his own chastity is in danger? Will his ordeal finally be ended with a knife to the throat, with eager believers soaking up his blood with handkerchiefs in memory of his martyrdom? I have frankly never wished for anything more in regards to this strip.
Pluggers, 1/20/24
Because I’m a hip young person with the cutting edge job of “blogger,” my calendar is on my computer and backed up to the cloud, but somehow I had never really thought to use the calendar’s search function before, and the other day while looking for something I discovered to my surprise — and, frankly, delight — that everything I’ve ever put in there, going back to 2003, has been retained! I can see all my quotidian appointments for the last two decades! Only today, in seeing this panel, did I realize that I have become truly one of the most unsettling beings of all: the cyber-plugger.
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