Apartment 3-G, 3/22/06

OK. I know I’m dating myself by saying this, but I remember when newspaper comics used to actually be funny.

No! Really! I’m serious!

It used to be that you could open the comics page of a major metropolitan newspaper like the The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Bulletin, or The Baltimore Sun and pretty reliably expect to laugh out loud several times in the course of reading the comics.

Don’t look at me that way! It’s true! Go ask your Mom.

Of course, with very few exceptions, the current crop of bland, sanitized, tiny-paneled, poorly drawn and inexcusably unfunny comics are more likely to elicit bemusement, as in “Why is this page even here?”, and I won’t even go into the sorry state of newspaper adventure comics.

Enter The Comics Curmudgeon, a delightful blog by freelance writer Josh Fruhlinger that was originally called I Read The Comics So You Don’t Have To, in which he posts current comic strips and comments on them like… well, like the wonderful curmudgeon he is.

Here’s a sample snippet of his take on the Apartment 3-G strip shown above from March 23:

“Holy crap but that’s a scary word balloon. It doesn’t just have icicles; it has slime-dripping tentacles, like a floating jellyfish of scorn. Watch out, Eskimo-kissing couple in the background (or, alternately, waiter with poor sense of personal space and startled restaurant patron)! Margo’s octopus of disdain has been unleashed, and there’s no stopping it!“

As he goes on, strip after strip, you not only realize how unfunny many of these strips are, but how truly and absolutely weird and bizarre the comics pages have become. His comments are often as funny as the newspaper comics “back when” used to be.

The best way to read Josh’s posts is to click into the detail of a post so you can read his reader’s comments, many of which are almost as funny as Josh’s take, and then click through in the convenient “Next Post/Previous Post” links to other posts with comments.

Why aren’t these people writing comics?