Stripped

I try to read my favorite funnies every day.

Alas, the newspaper is not the best way to do this. Not only do the locals not carry everything I want, but the paper doesn’t always come before I leave for the office. Plus I can’t forward on the ones I like to my friends. Plus, of course, it costs money.

So I read my comic strips online. The two best sources for this are UComics and Comics.com.

UComics, from Universal Press Syndicate, lets you build your own funny page of the comics online, updated daily, etc. Through them I read The Boondocks, Doonesbury, For Better or For Worse, FoxTrot, Heart of the City, Mother Goose & Grimm, Non Sequitur, Real Life Adventures, Calvin and Hobbes (reprints), Liberty Meadows (reprints), Tom the Dancing Bug, Baldo, Compu-toon, Adam@Home, and Tom Toles (editorial).

The Comics.com is aligned with the United Media syndicate. It lets you have individual strips e-mailed to you on a daily basis. That’s a little less convenient, but it still works. Through them I read Rose is Rose, 9 Chickweed Lane, and Get Fuzzy.

Unfortunately (though understandably), distribution syndicate bounderies sometimes get in the way of all this convenience. A third big player is King Features Syndicate. They keep their comics online, too, including some of my favorites. Unfortunately, they have a two week time lag, i.e., the most recent strips as of today are for Tuesday, 24 December.

Feh.

I work around this with some King strips. Baby Blues I can read through the slow-loading but current pages of the Seattle Times. And Funky Winkerbean and Zits I can catch at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The San Francisco Chronicle also carries a number of comics on-line (though without archives).

(I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the “high tech” capitols of the US, Seattle and the Bay Area, carry such substantial on-line comic content. Most other newspapers simply have links to the syndicate pages.)

Alas, two of the comics I used to read via UComics — Bizarro and Crankshaft — are now no longer available there, sucked into King Features. Fortunately, the two Seattle papers carry them, so I’m okay, if a bit more inconvenienced.

There are also a few other comics I read on their own pages, including Dork Towers and The Norm.

Still, it would be nice if I could have it all, on one page, with no more price than the bandwidth and having to look past banner ads. Heck, I’d pay a subscription fee — a small one, at least — for that convenience.