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June 30, 2006
The Funnies
I know I'm the last idiot on the planet to hear about this, but I just discovered The Comics Curmudgeon (courtesy of John Walkenbach's "Blogs I Read" page). The Curmudgeon reads the comics every day and posts snarky comments about them, focussing heavily on the "soap" comics like "Apartment 3-G" and that 1950s throwback "They Do It Every Time".You can tell a lot about somebody from the comics they like. A person who outwardly appears to be a sane, productive member of society may turn out to enjoy "Rhymes with Orange". In the Seattle P-I I read about one-third of the comics each morning: "Dilbert", "Jump Start", "Curtis", Zits", "Boondocks", "Sherman's Lagoon", "Drabble", and of course "Dinette Set". I'll ready "Zippy" if I feel up to it. Then if my tea is taking an extra-long time to steep I might pick up a second tier of "Stone Soup", "Hagar" (didn't he used to be "the Horrible"?), "Hi & Lois", "Crock", and "Red & Rover". I also read "Doonesbury" online. "Zits", incidentally, is written by the same guy who writes "Baby Blues", which I don't read regularly but which someone recently sent us several anthologies of that I am chuckling over. And of course I love "Pogo" for its ineffable ineffableness. There, now you know more about me than I know about myself.
Microsoft has its own internal comic strip, called "Bug Bash". It ran for years in the MicroNews, the weekly newspaper, until the MicroNews went online-only and "Bug Bash" followed it. It's written by a guy who works in a group I won't identify (suffice it to say it's an anagram of BCMSN) and is actually quite hilarious in a "Garfield" sort of way. Meaning, it mines the same basic veins (bad teams, unproductive meetings, PMs, and wierd-oid Microsofties) over and over, but manages to be funny while doing so. It often uses the time-honored three-panel funny-sublime-ridiculous progression to humorous effect. The author took most of June off, but just came back today with a brand new strip. Yet another reason to come work for Microsoft.
Posted by AdamBa at June 30, 2006 04:35 PM
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Comments
I guess if I had more of a clue I would know that "Bug Bash" is up on a public website, bugbash.net. OK, so you can read it without coming to work for us. Although maybe we get them a bit earlier.
- adam
Posted by: Adam Barr at June 30, 2006 08:09 PM
You can find the author's earlier comic strip "Where the Buffalo Roam" here: http://www.shadowculture.com/wtbr/
Posted by: Neil S at July 3, 2006 10:42 AM
