Tag: comics

• I have caught up with Swan Boy (October 7, 2026)

  Since discovering it last week I have caught up with Branson Reese’s Swan Boy webcomic, chomping through eight years of daily strips.

• I have discovered Swan Boy (September 30, 2026)

  Swan Boy is a webcomic that Branson Reese has been drawing since 2018, and I like it very much. I had been vaguely but increasingly aware of it for a while, and then Adam of Rubbercat posted this appreciation of an acrobatic callback-to-a-flashback it pulled off, with clearly years’ worth of artistic improvement between the episodes, and I finally got curious enough to look. The second-ever Swan Boy strip has me laughing, as does every subsequent one I’ve clicked on, in publication order. I am in for a nice catch-up ride, I think.

• Did we really get mad about this? (September 28, 2026)

  Was just reading the Wikipedia article about Funky Winkerbean, which the cartoonist wrapped up a few years ago, after a 50-year run. It was a rare example of a daily comic strip whose creators allowed the characters to age in more-or-less real time, allowing them to add drama around character growth and change to the daily gags about family life.

• Funky old music-room posters (September 28, 2026)

  I recently dropped into a musical-instrument shop in downtown Bangor, Maine while visiting family. On the wall of a storage space in back hung a collection of circa-1980 posters by Tom Batiuk featuring Harry Dinkle, the monomaniacal high school band director from the American comic strip Funky Winkerbean. These were clearly designed and sold for display in school music rooms, and they made me ache with unexpected nostalgia.

• Your monkey’s on fire (July 13, 2026)

  Mimi Smartypants discovers this mid-century cartoon on a coaster in an antique store. She writes how she was initially stopped short by its seeming complete nonsense, and then decoded it with some amount of effort and deep-cultural recall—but at the risk of it all falling apart again if you analyze it too far past that point.

• To Hell and Galgenbeck (January 5, 2026)

  This week finds me gearing up to run a session or two of Mörk Borg, a doom-metal role-playing game and tiny cultural phenomenon that I discovered in November. As part of my research and preparation over this past weekend, I came across To Hell and Galgenbeck, the official Mörk Borg webcomic. It’s pretty great.

• Nothing Doing; Bad Angel (January 3, 2026)

  I have discovered Nothing Doing, a webcomic by the pseudonymous HORSE ON VHS. I like it very much. High-quality sitcom-style funny-animal office follies, and the attached strip resonated especially well with me, given my very recent experiences in running through tech-job interview gauntlets.

• Liberals, liberals, liberals! (September 18, 2025)

  I try not to make a habit of peeking at the trending-posts tab of my Mastodon server, but when I do it anyway, I often find myself thinking of the preceding 2005 installment of “Anthropomorphic Republican Talking Duck”, a “Mallard Fillmore” parody by Adam Jameson.

• YouTube comments are all right (August 8, 2025)

  They used to be famously the worst on the internet, but they've been pretty wholesome for a while now, yeah?

• Comixology Unlimited is pretty good (July 19, 2020)

  After using and enjoying it for most of the past nine months or so, I’ve let my subscription to Comixology’s “Unlimited” service lapse. My interest in comics comes and goes, and it happens to have faded out for the present. I imagine that Amazon will be pleased to resume accepting my six bucks per month once it returns.