And the winner for the best holiday-related groaner in the paper funnies goes to - who else? - Nancy!

Wait just a doggone minute! Morgan-Mar’s Irregular Webcomic is quitting too? And without warning? Isn’t he in the middle of about 14 different storylines, all of which exist only for parody and cheap jokes? Couldn’t he just make it easy on himself and do more all-black strips or other simple formula?

But many other webcomics did some attention-grabbing, entertaining or just plain cliffhangerish things to mark the end of 2006:

Goats gave a couple of otherwise-anonymous Topeka Prime Stormtroopers a big send off with the help of an overused Star Wars quote and space bunnies.

Schlock ended the year with an evil laugh. (Maybe with Narbonic gone, the Mercenaries are going to fill the demand for ‘openly evilness’?)

Not since the American Civil War have we seen “brother against brother” like we see it now in Ugly Hill. (But dude, Aloisius?)

In a rather strange way of preparing for its newspaper debut, Diesel Sweeties had a dire cliffhanger, with the beloved (and recently much-abused) Clango Clangotron severely non-functional! (With another one of those great Diesel Sweet Quotes: “Give it to us straight, Doc. I’m not sure we could handle it bi-curious right now.”)

The magic is getting pretty thick in Wapsi Square, with a confrontation between the ancients (featuring a killing that every Hollywood CGI studio would love!) followed by a ‘tween-holiday idyll with a surprise ending.

Nukees completed a rather convoluted storyline right at the end of the year.

But I like nerd jokes!

In the biggest surprise of the year-end, Least I Could Do uses the much-copied (and much-derided) Dickens Christmas schtick to get corny and sentimental… yes, LICD has gone soft!

And, wonder upon wonders, Ctrl-Alt-Del, the webcomic that webcomic lovers love to hate, and which often gets close to funny but so rarely in actual contact with it, actually made me spontaneously laugh. It was the usual less-than-promising set-up, as Ethan was drunk and Lucas was about to hit him, but then Ethan came up with a very comical “drunkenly out of touch with reality ramble” (and “drunken out of touch with reality rambles” usually are just pathetic to me, and not just CAD’s):

“Waaait a minute, how many fingersh did you put into that fist? It’s huge. You can’t use more than… twelve. That doesn’t look like a regulation sized fist…”

Thank you all, and Happy New Year.

I, for one, have never liked (Little Orphan) Annie’s more ‘modern’ hairstyle; I mean, if Nancy’s Aunt Fritzi can keep the same ‘do for 60+ years, why not Annie? Anyway, the current storyline in Annie’s strip has gotten stark raving weird. She’s out on a boat exploring the Bermuda Triangle with a believer and a skeptic who spend all their time yelling at each other. She sees a ‘lost squadron’ of planes fly over when nobody else does. Then she finds a weird door - in the boat - walks through it and - bam! - she’s on the Lost Continent of Atlantis, where she finds parallel characters to herself (with the old hair) and all her friends (Daddy Warbucks is Buk-War… and Mr. Am is Mr. Was) and then, suddenly, Atlantis is destroyed! But it isn’t! And Mr. Was starts explaining the Lost Continent’s rather odd relationship with time…

Recognize the song quote in the second panel? What are the current Annie artists smoking?!?

Okay, those webcomickers can be such a wily bunch. It turns out we didn’t have to wait long for DM-M’s new project, because that project is… Year 5 of ‘Irregular Webcomic’! Not funny, David.

Meanwhile at the lair of R.Stevens, I was wondering what he was going to do when the promotional stuff for the newspaper version of Diesel Sweeties referred to Maura as Clango’s girlfriend, when, followers of the web version know she is his/its ex-girlfriend and Clango’s current significent other is Pale Suzie. Either the paper Sweeties was going to follow a different storyline from the paperless, or Stevens would have to do what the comics biz calls a “reboot”. A “retcon”. A “forget everything you already know”. Well, it turns out he’s not rebooting the entire strip, he’s literally rebooting Clango! Using an old backup disk! Now that’s funny, R.

And Scary-Go-John Alison has finally let us see what the Vit-Rx Get Massive Potion has done to Amy, and, honestly, I expected more massiveness than she ended up with. The character should consider herself lucky she’s not in a comic authored by somebody who used to draw “She-Hulk”.

You will notice that the sidebar over there is now displaying a column of Project Wonderful adboxes. I’m not doing this for the money (yet), so, for a limited time, you can get placement in there for the bargain price of $0.00 (as one wily webcomicker has already done). That’s right, free. At least until somebody decides to shove you out with a bid of $0.01. Just call it an act of solidarity with anyone who has ever had to deal with evil squirrels.

Also, there is this Webcomic Wannabe who realized he just can’t draw so he has come up with a daily comic that uses manipulated news and ad photos. Of course, he can’t ‘photoshop’ worth a damn either, but he decided it was OK because he didn’t want anybody to think the pictures were authentic, and he calls it PHOTOSLOP. The site is very much in pre-beta status right now, but you can see the first week of “Photoslops” featuring George W. Bush, George Lucas, Pope Benedict, Nancy Pelosi, Jack Bauer, Paul McCartney, a dead tyrant, a really big bomb, people dressed as toast and the dog that looks like Donald Trump. PHOTOSLOP.COM. Highly recommended by the blogger here - for obvious reasons. (PLEASE don’t force me to make a full disclosure…)

Even when he’s just being silly, Randall XKCD Munroe is intellectually supercool:

“You know, I once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”
“I once shot a man in Reno, but I couldn’t tell you why.”
“I once shot a man in Reno, then I went home to cry.”
“I once shot a man in Reno, then I watered his cacti.”
“I once shot a man in Reno ’cause they canceled Firefly.”
“I once shot a man in Reno , him and all his succubi.”
“I once shot a man in Reno and a bunch more in My Lai.”
“I think we’re done.”

No, you’re not.

I once shot a man in Reno, and another in Lodi.

I once shot a cyclops in Reno, right between the eye.

I once shot a man in Reno, with a banjo on my thigh.

I once shot a man in Reno, but I should’ve done it in Las Vegas to get on CSI.

I once shot an elephant in my pajamas, because I’m Rufus T. Firefly.

I once shot a man in Cincinatti, ’cause he thought turkeys could fly.

I once shot a man in Reno, and he died of renal failure…

As you know, I keep an eye out for funny URLs featured in comic strips and find out if they really exist (and if they don’t, I quickly register the domain name and redirect it to here… bwahahahaha!). Well, the newspaper comic about working in a department store with the obvious title Retail (current content available via the Seattle PI; also NOT to be confused with the long-defunct webcomic Retail) had one of its characters start a blog (coopersretailblog.com) and yes, it is a real blog, written in the obnoxious voice of Cooper:

When I’m not lifting boxes, getting yelled at by my boss or being defecated on by the general public, I like to unwind with a game of Resident Evil or catch up on some classic literature like X-Men or Lone Wolf & Cub.

Cooper’s off-work interests and his attitude remind me of somebody else on the web. Hmm.

Anyway, this isn’t the first webpresence of the Retail comic (which is good because its distributor, King Features, really doesn’t like the web). At this site, you can leave messages with your own Retail horror stories and… well, that’s all you can do. (Easter egg: if you dial the number on the comic’s logo barcode, you get a voice mail service where you can also tell your stories)

It’s not much of stretch to say that “Retail” is hoping to become the “Dilbert” of direct customer contact. Here’s what King Features’ blurb about the strip says:

In an industry that employs more than 23 million people, (approximately one in five Americans), and handles consumer spending worth $4.1 trillion, the retail sector provides a rich source of humor stemming from the unique interactions between employees and shoppers. Retail, the first-ever comic strip to focus solely on this sector, presents a hilarious look at the retail industry by chronicling the daily events at the fictitious Grumbel’s department store. Created by Massachusetts retail management veteran Norm Feuti, the humor of Retail will play-out through the day-to-day trials and triumphs of four main Grumbel’s department store employees and the customers they encounter.

Uh, excuse me, but… 23 million people is one in five Americans? Did I miss some cataclysmic event that lowered the U.S. population from 300 million to 115 million? Or do they mean “employed” Americans? Even that seems pretty low. All I know is there are 277 million Americans NOT employed in retail, and that’s 277 million whose role in this dramedy is “customer”. And that’s where the Dilbert parallel falls apart. Millions of employed Americans have a “pointy-haired boss”… much fewer ARE “pointy-haired bosses”. But a lot more Americans are the Customers who are the antagonists in “Retail” than the Retail Workers who are the protagonists. Still, with “hit” TV shows being seen by 15 million of the aforementioned 300 million, that 23 million is a good sized audience to target. And, based on the comments so far on Cooper’s Retail Blog, that audience is responding positively to Cooper’s self-proclaimed “hate”. But you gotta wonder when Cooper is getting linked from the “Customers Suck” webforum by “Mr. Rude”.
Asides: Looking back as far as I could on Daily Ink’s “Retail” archive (one year), I found an earlier reference to a “blog”:

And compare this “Retail” from January 2006 to the last “Retail Weekly”
Webcomic from 2004:


I’m NOT accusing anybody of stealing ideas, it’s just that, in retail (as well as in “Retail”) there are some that are way too obvious…

Have you seen the Volkswagen ads for the CrossPolo featuring some classic comic strip characters? (Found via AdJab) The too-small-to-see-clearly-here ad line says “The Polo. Just a bit wilder.”

Garfield with Wolverine’s claws is kinda creepy. But what other funnypaper classics could they have used? Sounds like a PhotoSlop weekend theme to me.

As a long-time blogger who has had significant periods of communication ‘constipation’, I must say that I solidly agree with User Friendly on this:

I am (1) happy to hear that Corey P. will be continuing the saga of Barkeater Lake on his own site in a couple weeks, (2) impressed that he got a plug for the ‘new” BL on his last strip at comics.com…
and (3) rather annoyed by the fact that going to barkeaterlake.com after Saturday at Midnight sends your browser into an epileptic fit. Apparently it doesn’t know whether to redirect to comics.com or to Pandolph’s new sitre, or maybe it’s alternately trying both but finding nothing at either address or something (still throwing fits after Midnight on Sunday).

More news from the Lake as it happens…