It actually started on Friday with Diesel Sweeties’ Web Edition, doing a bunch of quick jokes under the title “Nine Sequiturs” and rstevens writing the words I never thought I’d ever see from a webcomicker: “(With apologies to Wiley)”. Sweeties demonstrated once again that it has one of the highest batting averages for ‘bringing the funny’ of any comic on/and/or/offline with such gems as “Never trust a box of condoms labeled ‘Family Pack’” and “I © Dead People (this message brought to you by lawyers representing he estate of the late M. Night Shayamalan in the year 2089)” and the one pictured here, a beyond-nerdy in-joke for writers of sci-fi-sit-coms.

Then Sunday came around and I began to wonder about rstevens’ pledge to try to do ‘family-friendly’ material for the papers (wouldn’t you love to be a parent being asked by their kid “what does he mean by THAT?”)

You see, the tattoo is in an embarrassing place, and he sees it every day, so it can’t be his behind…

But it’s a couple of the oft-ridiculed old-guard that are the strangest things to show on Sunday… First, the second generation of Harts damage their fourth cave wall by finally admitting that there are other pop culture cave folk:

And this Family Circus might be better titled “Family Recursion”:

Another quote I never expected to see: “That’s nothing we’d ever use in Family Circus” IN a Family Circus cartoon.

I guess I must confess that a diagnosed case of depression is one of the major reasons I haven’t updated the Paperless enough (or finished a redesign that I started MONTHS ago). Or I may just be using depression as an excuse for being a lazy bum. Still, this Questionable Content was something I could unquestionably relate to, but never having been ‘a drinker’, I wanted to excerpt the part most relevant to me:

I do agree that good diet and exercise often help me even more than the ‘happy pills’, but when other physical health issues keep me from exercising, it turns into a vicious cycle, and being stuck in front of the computer screen for long hours no longer insures that I’ll get anything done. Sigh.

But it’s the punchline that I can most relate to, because I was part of one of the clinical trials for “swift kick in the rear therapy” while I had to share a small apartment with my retired father for over a year. My results were inconclusive, but I suspect that I was part of the ‘control’ group, since, at his age, my dad’s kicks aren’t really all that swift.
Still, I was disappointed to hear the recent news that Pfizer had secured a patent for the Swift Kick™.
(It will be interesting to see if this post gets any reaction… I have my suspicions about the overlap between the psychopharmacologically savvy and webcomics fans)

…if those people spent their energy supporting strips they actually LIKE.” And while you’re at it, “Imagine there’s no Heaven, it’s easy if you try…” It’s always semi-newsworthy when characters in a newspaper comic force open small cracks in the Fourth Wall and make references to the “Comic Strip Business”, and Retail, “the Dilbert for cash register jockeys” did it today.

Now, I wonder who he could be talking about who “read(s) the strips (they) DON’T like and make fun of them online”? Hmmmm? In all fairness to the Curmugeonly Josh (and I feel no NEED to be fair to him, but I will), his blog does go beyond just making fun. His recent analysis of the “Death of Lisa” storyline at Funky Winkerbean was excellent. And, it was certainly better than the analysis in Retail’s Norm Feuti’s own blog, especially since he says “I have to confess that I’ve never followed Funky Winkerbean.” (He also addresses the status of For Better Or For Worse, again admitting that he doesn’t follow it regularly, and therefore totally missing the current life-or-death drama in that supposedly semi-active strip)

And Norm’s own blog should not be confused with Cooper’s Retail Blog, which I addressed here before. Of course, having planted an URL in his comic before, Norm was obviously up to something when he highlighted “hateoncomics.com”, and sure enough, going there got you this message:

Sorry, no hating on comics here. But if you’d like to hate on things that are retail related, you’ve come to the right place. Click on the picture to the left to see the rest of Cooper’s Retail Blog.

There was only one problem. Clicking on the picture CRASHED MY FIREFOX BROWSER. Even using IE, it took forever to load.

Retail is solidly on my “B” list of daily comics… not great, but better than 90% of what’s in the papers AND on the web. And I have always supported giving the better webcomics some space in the newspapers… but now I wonder if it’s a good idea to let these ink-stained comickers onto the internet…