The Comics List

I have always read newspaper comics in massive quantities. When I lived in the Philippines, the Stars And Stripes, the only newspaper available on military bases, had room for just a dozen or so comics, so I used to go down to the base library and read the Sunday comics from all the stateside newspapers. There were always some great obscure comics that only appeared in a few newspapers.

When I was in high school, the morning newspaper carried Bloom County but the afternoon paper carried Doonesbury. Somehow I talked my parents into subscribing to both. I would come home from school and turn up the stereo as loud as possible without masking the sound of the newspaper being delivered. The afternoon 'newsboy' was an older guy in my math class that would make the route with his girlfriend in his poorly mufflered pick-up truck. I could hear his truck coming down the street. After it passed, I would go out to pick it up and wave at the two of them as they rounded the cul-de-sac and headed back up the street.

For years I subscribed to the local paper, the Baltimore Sun, but I would also read the Washington Post whenever I was near a newsstand in part because it had three whole pages of comics. One day my wife subscribed to the Post for me in order to sign up for a discount at the grocery store. It was one of the most thoughtful gifts she has ever given me.

After a major comics page purge, the Sun's comics page only had three or four strips not carried in the Post. Soon afterwards, I dropped the Sun as it continued to atrophy into the pale shell of its former self which is making H. L. Mencken spin in his grave.

Now the Washington Post is sliding headlong down that same slippery slope. It just eliminated its separate business section (where it used to hide Dilbert) and consolidated the comics down to two pages of cataract-inducing fine print. They still carry Doonesbury full size on page C3, but the rest are in four skinny columns. Here is the current line-up:

Page 1 Column 1 Garfield Tack McNamara Prickly City Non Sequitur Big Nate Beetle Bailey Speed Bump

Page 1 Column 2 Zits Judge Parker Candorville Cul De Sac Spider-Man Watch Your Head Baby Blues On The Fastrack Pearls Before Swine Dennis The Menace Family Circus Close To Home

Page 2 Column 1 Mutts Red And Rover Frank and Ernest Classic Peanuts Rhymes With Orange Lio Hagar The Horrible Blondie

Page 2 Column 2 Dilbert Agnes Get Fuzzy Pickles Mark Trail Mother Goose and Grimm Baldo Sally Forth Sherman's Lagoon Curtis Brewster Rockit

In the purge, WaPo had originally cut Judge Parker but had to restore it after public outcry. In what I consider kind of a 'Fuck you!' move, to make room for it, they moved Frazz from the comics page to the Kidz Page after a brief try with Agnes there. That means Frazz only runs four times a week, destroying the continuity of the weekly gags. They just don't get it.

To get the comics I can't find in WaPo, I use a couple of internet subscription services. I recently had a scare when my GoComics e-mail service stuttered to a stop. After panicking and getting to the bottom of that SNAFU (it seems that they had both an old credit card number and an abandoned e-mail address), I updated the list of comics I have mailed to me every morning. That list now includes the following:

Annie Brenda Starr Bo Nanas (which I just learned is reruns) The Elderberries Dog Eat Doug For Heaven's Sake Girls & Sports Housebroken Ink Pen The Meaning of Lila Stone Soup Tiny Sepuku Compu-toon Neurotica

Bound and Gagged Flo and Friends Big Top Cathy The Fusco Brothers On A Claire Day The Other Coast Yenny PreTeena Pigborn Adam@Home Gil Thorp Herb and Jamaal La Cucaracha Shoe

Tom The Dancing Bug Daddy's Home Ballard Street The Argyle Sweater Cleats Dick Tracy The Dinette Set Gasoline Alley Pluggers The Quigmans Real Life Adventures Rubes Ziggy

But even that service doesn't cover all the comics I want to read on a daily basis. I also subscribe to Comics.com which e-mails the following strips:

9 Chickweed Lane
Arlo & Janis
Cow & Boy
F-Minus
Frazz (which I just added so I don't miss some)
Grand Avenue
Jump Start
Little Dog Lost (which got dumped by WaPo in the purge after only a month)
Luann
Monty
Rose Is Rose
Rudy Park
Secret Asian Man
The Knight Life (which is Sunday only in WaPo)
Working Daze
Working Out
Zack Hill

Finally, I know that Josh, THE Comics Curmudgeon uses the Houston Chronicle's rather comprehensive comics page for his comics reading since he, like me, has been abandoned by the ever-shrinking Sunpapers. I have two beefs with the Chron. First, they don't have Sunday strips and second, they won't throw it on my lawn or e-mail it to my inbox. That makes it the source of last resort since I forget to check it every day. So here are the strips carried by the Chronicle not available anywhere else:

Archie Apartment 3-G* Better Half Between Friends Boffo Buckles Cleats Crock Drabble Edge City Funky Winkerbean Grin and Bear It Lockhorns Mallard Fillmore *added after initial post

Mary Worth My Cage Pardon My Planet Phantom Popeye Rex Morgan Safe Havens Six Chix Slylock Fox Snuffy Smith Edison Lee Tiger Willy & Ethel Zippy the Pinhead

That makes the total number of comics on my daily or near-daily list:
WaPo: 38
GoComics: 42
Comics.com: 17
The Chron: 28
Grand Total: 125

That sounds like a lot, but it's probably less than fifteen minutes a day of reading. The biggest hurdle has been weeding out duplicates. For example, Dog Eat Doug is available on both GoComics and Comics.com. Since GoComics shows up in the inbox before Comics.com (which often doesn't arrive until I'm already at work), it makes sense to delete it from the Comics.com list.

The other hassle is keeping up with the current purges. Willy and Ethel was once in the Sun and Zippy was perhaps the cruelest cut from WaPo's line-up. All the hippies that used to defend it seemed to have switched their efforts to the rejuvenated Judge Parker. Even the Houston Chronicle has its issues. I hadn't updated my reading list in quite a while and for some inexplicable reason 9 Chickweed Lane appears in the place of the dropped strips. I like the comic, but I don't need to read it four times.

Also, note the conspicuous absence of the time-warped For Better Or For Worse on any of these lists. It's dead to me.

All of this is a lot of work, but it sure beats going to the library and reading back issues of out-of-town newspapers. And as the dead trees industry continues to hemorrhage, even that might not be an option some day.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: The obvious question is: What am I missing? Which comics from one of those services should I be reading? The other burning issue is if there is another way. How can I get as many comics as possible with the least effort?