Journal Entry #38: The Funnies

Date: December 6, 2007
Time: 22:41

I finally figured out what to write about this evening. I admit it, there have been more than a few times when I have had idea zero as to what to write here, but now I have a subject: Comic Strips.

Now, now, I'm not going to into the history of comic strips, talking about one of the first political cartoons, or anything like that, I'm going to write about some of my favorites, and some of them are not in the newspaper, at least not in any New York paper I've seen.

I read Online Comic Strips.

One of the funniest I've read so far is called "Sheldon" by Dave Kellett.

Sheldon concerns a 10-year old boy, who is not only a genius, but he owns his very own multi-billion dollar software company. He lives with his grandfather, a duck named "Arthur", into whom young Sheldon implanted a dictionary, and voice-recognition software, and now Arthur can talk. He recently got a Pug dog named "Oso", Arthur hatched an egg that turned out to have lizard in it, who was soon named "Flaco", and Sheldon has a best friend named "Dante".

I discovered the existence of this strip many years ago when I was using the internet for something other than work. I later had the opportunity to meet the creator of this strip at the New York Comic-Con in 2006, and I bought the first book of collected strips from him and got it autographed.

I had to put the book down after a few minutes because I couldn't stop laughing.

http://www.sheldoncomics.com/

Yahoo.com has a great many online only strips, as does Comics.com, and Ucomics.com

There is one newspaper's website I've found that not only has some online only strips, but one comic strip in particular that you probably wouldn't get to see otherwise. The newspaper is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the strip is "The Phantom" by Lee Falk.

What I like most about this particular strip is you get two stories for the same price. There is one storyline that runs Monday to Saturday, and another that is Sunday only. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/phantom.asp

Now I have to warn you, the storyline that that link takes you to has been going on for over a month. It concerns a little girl who has been going around her city, painting pictures of an heroic figure of a man she believes she made up, but in "reality", it's The Phantom, and he's been going around trying to cover up the paintings so no one asks too many questions. Her parents tried taking her to a psychiatrist because they found pictures she had drawn of this "Hero" and thought she was obsessed with "him", and had in fact, copied the figure from the graffiti.

There's more to the story, but I'll let you find it out for yourself.

Be advised though, a lot of these strips that have ongoing stories only go back a set number of days, so if you've missed the beginning, like with this one, you're pretty much stuck.

Unless of course, they find a way to reprint them.