A Horse Walks into a Bar...

Posted by Josh

https://joshreads.com/2025/09/i-guess-technically-speaking-they-still-have-to-get-out-of-the-tree-first/

https://joshreads.com/?p=47494

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, 9/25/25

Wow, back in the day, you could write a long, crazy yarn about an unlikely trio hot-air-balloon-crashing into the remote woods, where they’d never be able to get back to civilization and have to turn to cannibalism to survive. But now they have cell phones and can just call an Uber to come get them or whatever. Boring!

Gearhead Gertie, 9/25/25

It seems particularly cruel for Gertie to use NASCAR analogies for defeating her husband in their arguments, since their arguments are inevitably about NASCAR. But I guess literally everything she says, does, and thinks about is NASCAR. She has no other context! It’s NASCAR all the way down!

Six Chix, 9/25/25

I of course am on the record as enjoying the Tuesday Chik’s sandwich sex strips. But when it comes to perversity, I have to say that I’m even more impressed with this one, which starts off as a corny, punny joke but very quickly gets to a place where we need to accept that this lady loves, has married, and, yes, has sex with a sentient set of stairs.

https://joshreads.com/2025/09/i-guess-technically-speaking-they-still-have-to-get-out-of-the-tree-first/

https://joshreads.com/?p=47494

Posted by Josh

https://joshreads.com/2025/09/dropping-is-a-much-nicer-way-to-put-it-than-crashing-lets-go-with-that/

https://joshreads.com/?p=47487

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!

Crock, 9/24/25

In my freshman year of college, there was an outbreak of E. coli at various Jack in the Boxes that killed four children, and a friend of mine who had worked at McDonald’s told me something I have never forgotten, which was that (at the time, anyway) they never taught fast food workers how to tell if a burger was cooked properly, but instead just taught them to put it on a bun when the timer rang. “If that timer went haywire and started ringing early, I would have definitely been serving people raw hamburgers,” he said. It was enough to keep me off fast food hamburgers for life, though for some entirely fake reason the flash-fried breaded chicken products seem safe to me. Anyway, my point is, I was using this news peg to play my fun “what year is this Crock rerun from?” game and was going to triumphantly announce that it was 1993, but then I saw that it actually had a 1997 copyright date, which means that even upon its original publication it was four years out of date.

Luann, 9/24/25

So Gunther and his girlfriend Bets are doing some sort of fundraiser for animal adoption with their cosplay group and are of course cosplaying appropriately. At first I was going to come in hot and absolutely furious at how much more work she had put into her costume than he did, but then I remembered the last time Gunther engaged in sexy, elaborate cosplay it was fucking horrifying, so I think he should actually be discouraged from applying any more effort to this whole thing than he’s doing now.

Rhymes With Orange, 9/24/25

Have you guys seen how much mortuary services cost? If my funeral were botched in such a disgraceful fashion, I would certainly hope that one of my loved ones would speak up on behalf of my dignity and the dignity of those gathered to mourn, rather than just cracking wise.

Mary Worth, 9/24/25

If there’s one thing I hope to have established in 20 years of blogging, it’s that joshreads dot com is your number one website for finding out if today’s comics pages feature Mary Worth, a psychic child, and a guy dressed sort of like an old lighthouse keeper screaming in terror as their hot air balloon crashes into a pine forest. If you’re wondering, today is, at long last, that day.

https://joshreads.com/2025/09/dropping-is-a-much-nicer-way-to-put-it-than-crashing-lets-go-with-that/

https://joshreads.com/?p=47487