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! Pluggers, 4/22/24 John Cougar Mellencamp sits at the intersection of plugger and poet, and I have long believed that “Life goes on/ long after the thrill of living is gone” is one of the most poignant lines in the corpus of 20th century American literature. Anyway, mad respect to Pluggers today for briefly but explicitly acknowledging the overpowering miasma of hopelessness ..read more

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! Mary Worth, 4/21/24 You’d think that boxing talk combined with Wilbur going into a traumatized fugue state would be a perfect opportunity for a return of the boxing Wilburbabies, but, no, instead he’s fantasizing about being a superhero or whatever, probably because even he knows he couldn’t defeat Zak in a straight-up boxing match. I think it’s funny that his super-alter-eg ..read more

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! Between Friends, 4/20/24 Not to sound like the old person that I literally am, but TV used to be a lot fewer two-hour movie premises stretched out over eight to ten 45-minute episodes and a lot more 85 episodes about friends just kind of hanging out and then, if they were popular enough to get a little budget boost, the occasional Very Special Episode where the gang all went ..read more

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! Your COTW is right here, right now! “Hey guys, an app that can load the dishwasher is called a robot. How soon we forget the tropes of yesteryear.” –Hibbleton Your runners up are also hilarious! “Hey, if Wilbur had been walking just a little faster, the kid would have barreled into him and WILBUR would have exploded under the wheels of the mysterious army-green van. I thin ..read more

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! Dennis the Menace, 4/19/24 There’s been a disturbing trend lately of Dennis the Menace panels where Dennis doesn’t figure into the gag at all, even as an unseen presence, and instead it’s just Mr. and Mrs. Wilson going about their daily lives, and while I guess it might be a smart move to pander to the newspaper comics’ aging audience, frankly I’m not a fan. This could have ..read more

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! Six Chix, 4/18/24 I’ll freely admit that I find floating Poseidon here very charming, with his cheery attitude and his whole … diaper? situation and a single eye perched right on his dick, perhaps in loving memory of his son Polyphemus, cut down in his prime by Odysseus. Anyway, much as it pains me to be pedantic (haha, just kidding, I love pedantry more than I love my own f ..read more

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! Blondie, 4/17/24 Most Blondie strips aren’t exactly Shakespeare, but there’s usually … a recognizable jokes? A punchline? People are way too ready to say this, but today’s strip — which is just “Wow, there’s an app for everything!” “Too bad there isn’t an app for loading the dishes!” “There should be an app for loading the dishes, the thing I’m doing right now!” — is so disj ..read more

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! Alice, 4/15/24 I’m happy to report that, sine I started reading Alice a few weeks ago, I have fallen thoroughly, 100% under its spell. This strip takes perfectly ordinary situations, like when you receive parrot medicine from beloved novelist and short story writer Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) but are then unable to give it to your parrot because it flies away, and turns them i ..read more

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! Mary Worth, 4/14/24 Are you feeling down, my friends? Depressed? Abandoned? Do you worry that nobody loves you, simply because, in many ways both large and small, you have with your own actions made yourself unloveable? Well, just think about this: maybe someday you’ll rudely bump into a child because you’re deep in your own internal pity party and not watching where you’re ..read more

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! Hi and Lois, 4/13/24 Two things you have to keep in mind when reading today’s Hi and Lois: (a) despite my many jokes about how Trixie is an eternal baby who’s been an infant for 70 years now, we have to understand that, in the world of the strip, she’s actually less than a year old, and (b) the Flagston family dog is named Dawg. Which means that at some point, possibly quite ..read more