Statistics April: In Which People Look To Me For Something Not Comic-Strip-Related

You know what data WordPress never gives you about your readership? It’s what search terms brought readers. I suppose they figure to writers that data, unaware that while I enjoy this blog I could also do other stuff with my time. Still, what gets me wondering about search terms is that my most popular posting from April was not a comic strip update. In fact, of the seven most popular pieces — there was a three-way tie for fifth — four of them had nothing to do with comics. Here’s the most popular April posts:

• Would the Person From Area Code 661 Who Tried to Call Me Please Exist?
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What is this John X business? January – April 2024
• Wait a minute, there’s an eclipse like every year!
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? Is the place actually named Gasoline Alley? January – March 2023
• Don’t Tell Me You Never Heard of the Movie, I Know You’re Fibbing
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Was the last three months *all* praising Mary Worth? January – April 2024
• MiSTed: Jaded Views, Part 1

Right? Isn’t that weird? The most popular Statistics Saturday post was one I expected to do well, Statistics Saturday: Things You Should Know For The Solar Eclipse. This was another Statistics Saturday post that could as easily have been an essay, if I were still in the business of writing essays.

Also why has my readership taken this turn where it goes way up and then way down in alternate months? Why not a gradual trend one way or another?

Despite the popularity of me grumbling about a spam call and me being facetious about solar eclipses, this was a down month for my readership. I suppose people weren’t looking as much for Easter egg dye color information after Easter was done and all. There were 5,253 page views in April, well below the twelve-month running mean of 5,743.7 and a bit below the running median of 5,483.5. The unique visitor count was also down, with 3,019 visiting in April. The running mean had 3,334.4 visitors in a month, and the median 3,084.5.

In terms of interactions, though, this was a more normal month. There were 122 likes given to posts over April, noticeably above the running mean of 96.8 and the running median of 98. Huh. And comments were almost exactly on average, with 54 given or received, compared to a mean of 56.3 and median of 56.5.

As usual, I have plans for the month ahead. Also as usual, the plans only go so far as talking about comic strips. In particular, my expectation is that I’ll be posting something about these comics more or less on these days:

• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (7th of May)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (14th of May)
• Emi Burdge and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye (21st of May)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (28th of May)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (What have you)

And I will say, Comics Kingdom’s new thing where subscribers can look at a strip up to a week ahead of publication? That ought to make it a lot easier to get ahead of deadline on these essays. It doesn’t, but it so ought to.

Oh so now can I mention that just this past month I learned that the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved fourteen years ago? I mean, the islands are still there, it’s just that they’re no longer politically organized as a constituent country of the Netherlands anymore. Two of them became their own constituent countries of the Netherlands and the others became part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This doesn’t seem to me like they’re getting much of anywhere but it’s not my place to organize Dutch rule of Caribbean people.

Back to countries. There were 91 countries sending me any readers at all, so even though the reading population was smaller it was better dispersed. 25 of them were single-reader countries, including a mysterious “Unknown Region” that I imagine reflects where Wilbur Weston was tossed off a cruise ship or something.

Country	Readers
United States	3,935
Canada	210
United Kingdom	208
Philippines	177
Australia	97
India	73
Brazil	41
France	29
Ireland	27
Germany	26
Italy	26
South Africa	25
Sweden	25
Spain	24
Greece	22
Mexico	13
Singapore	12
Colombia	11
Netherlands	11
Thailand	11
European Union	10
Pakistan	10
Denmark	9
Japan	9
Norway	9
Russia	9
Saudi Arabia	9
Croatia	8
Indonesia	8
Czechia	7
South Korea	7
Turkey	7
Argentina	6
Portugal	6
Switzerland	6
Taiwan	6
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Israel	5
Luxembourg	5
New Zealand	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Bahamas	4
Chile	4
Kazakhstan	4
Malaysia	4
Poland	4
Romania	4
Serbia	4
Uganda	4
Austria	3
Belgium	3
Cuba	3
Egypt	3
Finland	3
Hungary	3
Kenya	3
Puerto Rico	3
Caribbean Netherlands	2
Costa Rica	2
Iraq	2
Mozambique	2
Nigeria	2
Palestinian Territories	2
Qatar	2
Slovakia	2
Vietnam	2
Åland Islands	1
Albania	1 (*)
Armenia	1
Belarus	1
Bulgaria	1
El Salvador	1 (**)
Faroe Islands	1
Grenada	1
Jamaica	1
Jordan	1
Kosovo	1
Lebanon	1
Lithuania	1
Macao SAR China	1
Maldives	1 (*)
Malta	1
Montenegro	1
Morocco	1
Nepal	1 (**)
South Sudan	1
St. Lucia	1
St. Vincent & Grenadines	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Unknown Region	1
Venezuela	1

El Salvador and Nepal have sent me a sole page view three months in a row. Albania and Maldives have sent a single view only two months in a row now. And that’s the single-view count for April. Remember, you can keep your country from being a single-view country just by hitting refresh on this page! I think. I’m not positive. You might want to click on a second or third page to be sure.

For the start of May, 2024, WordPress estimates that I’ve had about 428,747 page views here from 242,053 unique visitors. It also estimates that I published 13,920 words in April, which is surprising because that’s 24 words fewer than I did in March when I had all those short-format pairwise comparisons going. Still, the average length of a post dropped from 549 words in March to 528 words in April so the difference isn’t entirely that I had fewer days to go on like this.

If you’d like to see me going on like this most days, why not sign up as a regular reader? The surest way to get everything I post is to put my RSS feed into your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you probably do, it’s just not advertised as such. Next-best is to click the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button up and to the right of this text on your page here; that should add it to your WordPress Reader. If you’d like the unedited and uncorrected pieces e-mailed to you, there’s a similar box where you can put in your e-mail address and get daily posts. I don’t do anything with your e-mail addresses besides send these posts, but it’s WordPress who gets your e-mail so I can’t promise what they do. Probably something horrible; you know how companies are. Sorry. On to the goofball stuff tomorrow.

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What is this John X business? January – April 2024

The past couple months in Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) has seen a lot of Jungle Patrol head Colonel Worubu looking over the Unknown Commander’s new office. This is justified by the import of the thing. Tony DePaul is trying to revise a big part of Phantom Pholklore. Up to now, The Phantom has given his orders to the Jungle Patrol by orders left in a safe, signalled by a light above the door. Now, The Phantom, and DePaul, want the Unknown Commander to have new ways to be “seen” by his forces. If the big change doesn’t get screen time to make an impression and show why this is more interesting it doesn’t get weight; compare the hilarious failure of the multicolored Daleks that one Doctor Who. The bigger panels and looser story of a Sunday continuity give time to luxuriate in this.

That’s my interpretation, anyway; you can have others and DePaul is certainly willing to discuss his own ideas of why he writes what he does. Anyway, if you’re looking for recaps of the weekday plot, or for a more up-to-date Sundays recap and it’s after about July 2024, try this link. If those don’t work try some other links. Something will turn up. Back to Jungle Patrol Headquarters, now:

The Phantom (Sundays).

28 January – 21 April 2024.

The Unknown Commander’s office renovations were freshly done, when I last checked in. And then we saw The Ghost Who Rehearses going over a script with Diana.

Back at Jungle Patrol Headquarters, Colonel Worubu and Captain Weeks can’t resist the temptation to see the Unknown Commander’s office. Especially now that there’s personal possessions in it. We spend a lot of time in this, examining things brought from the treasure rooms — sextants and battle flags and Maltese Falconses and such. It deeply impresses the Colonel and the Captain.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 17th of March, 2024. DePaul really gives frustrated-lit-majors a treat with this Maltese Falcon which, of course, is a thing invented for the novel without basis in reality. This whole story has been about creating fictions; the opening and framing even had “Lee Falk” — a fictional version of the man, standing in for DePaul and (I read it) all creators of Phantom stories — addressing the audience and speaking of how even he doesn’t know what The Phantom is thinking. This reached its peak on the 11th of February, where “Lee Falk” peeks over The Phantom’s shoulder as he writes his Chronicles, and The Phantom notices. An actual critic would launch an essay about text and metatext on that.

Finally, The Phantom breaks silence, speaking over the hidden speakers to Worubu and Weeks. His declaration: when John X gets back, bring him to the Unknown Commander’s office. X’s most recent report is inadequate. Also, turn the lights out when you leave.

The Phantom then returns to Jungle Patrol headquarters, in his guise as John X. He had, as John X, spread the story he thought the Unknown Commander was dead and was supposedly checking the post office box in Mawitaan for orders. Worubu brings John X in and they hear … nothing.

Next Week!

After some of the indignities of age we swerve into dog medicine in Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., next week. Uh … there is pet endangerment in the current storyline but, c’mon, it’s Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan. Everything’s going to be okay, and pretty fast.

Why It’s Good to Make Notes of Every Idea You Have, Whether They Seem Any Good or Not

It’s because sometimes you will have a day when you’re up against deadline, and nothing’s working, and you can dip into the archives and pull up:

• https://lugnut215.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/naming-of-lansing-streets/
• security in the lint trap?

Yes, the idea scraps file has been a good use of resources.

The Eternal Dilemma

Me: I am short on time. I would open up a bit of that time if I picked a repeat for the daily blog here and just went with that.

Also me: Spends more time picking out a repeat than it would take to have an original idea and write that up.

Anyway, here’s Rhode Island measured in terms of Football Fields. Yes, I’m including Block Island and the end zones.

Statistics March: People Want Me To Explain Why The Comics Look Weird

It’s because Mike Manley has had health problems and substitute artists had to take over his strips. This ought to be an easy thing for comic strip web sites to take care of, but the people designing them made absolutely no allowances for the idea a comic strip might be created by different people at different times. Be gentle. Comics Kingdom can’t figure out how to put a list of comic strips in alphabetical order.

So that is a part of why I had a quite busy month around here, readership-wise. The other part is that years ago I posted an actual factual useful guide about which color Paas tablet gives you what color egg, and people go looking for that in the week before Easter and not afterwards. That did juice my totals, although even if you take out all the readers who came for the Paas tablets you’d still see a rise in readership in March compared to February. The numbers, hard as they might sort of be:

I wonder why there wasn’t a Paas-tablet-juiced peak in spring of 2023. We did have an Easter that year, didn’t we?
Screenshot

As hinted, there were 6,654 page views here in March, well above the twelve-month running mean of 5,633.8 and running median of 5,364.5. These came from 3,896 logged distinct visitors, above the running mean of 3,265.8 and blowing way past the running median of 3,075. There were 101 likes, pretty much dead on what you’d expect with a running mean of 98.1 and median of 98. The only shortfall this time was comments: there were 25 of them — the first time in almost two years there were fewer comments than posts — and way below the running mean of 60.8 and median of 57.5. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

The most popular thing this past month was the Paas Tablet thing. Various posts about comic strips being weird were also popular, as was my confessing that I only just that day got this one Far Side comic. People love reading about other people admitting they didn’t get something. The six most popular things posted in March, though, during the month of March, were:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why does every comic look funny these days? December 2023 – March 2024
• Statistics February: While the Comics Kingdom Website Dies Why Not Read About My Writing?
• What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is Dick Tracy all about Little Orphan Annie again? December 2023 – March 2024
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Hair (the musical) versus Geography
• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 31
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? What happened to King Guz? December 2023 – March 2024

(The last three were tied for readers, which is why it’s not a top-five list.)

The most popular Statistics Saturdays of the month were a tie between What You Use Your Time Machine for as a Kid Versus as a Mature Person and Some Common Biological Terms That Biologists Agree Have No Actual Definition, Despite Being Good at Their Jobs

For the month to come … I have a lot of Comics Kingdom strips I planned to recap. With the web site redesign this is … you know, the redesign has settled into something not bad, especially for rolling back week after week in a single comic. The Favorites page is still a mess, but when they figure out “show comics in a defined order” again I’ll be roughly okay with it. Anyway, trusting that the site continues to be more or less okay, here’s my plan for the next couple weeks:

• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (9 April)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (16 April)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (23 April)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (30 April)
• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (7 May)

If it strikes you that maybe Flash Gordon ought to fit in here somewhere too, yeah, you’re right; how about that?

I am always amazed by how many South American countries send me page views, which I can’t explain as some sort of accident or maybe prank on the part of a South American ISP. I’m glad to have the readers, I just know how provincial my writing is.

91 countries or country-like things sent me readers in March. 20 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster and how it compares to February’s:

Country	Readers
United States	5,185
Canada	223
Australia	165
United Kingdom	162
Brazil	112
India	100
Italy	66
Philippines	46
Netherlands	30
Switzerland	30
Sweden	28
Mexico	27
Germany	24
Spain	24
Czechia	23
France	23
Finland	21
South Africa	15
Hong Kong SAR China	14
Israel	14
Austria	12
Portugal	12
Trinidad & Tobago	12
Ecuador	11
Indonesia	11
Ireland	11
Argentina	10
Georgia	10
New Zealand	10
Poland	10
Russia	10
Saudi Arabia	10
Japan	9
Jordan	9
Uganda	9
Estonia	8
Romania	8
Turkey	8
Greece	7
Jamaica	7
Norway	7
Pakistan	7
Peru	7
Puerto Rico	7
Thailand	7
Colombia	5
Malaysia	5
Ukraine	5
Cayman Islands	4
Nigeria	4
Serbia	4
Taiwan	4
Denmark	3
Oman	3
South Korea	3
Sri Lanka	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Cambodia	2
Chile	2
Cuba	2
Dominican Republic	2
European Union	2
Guam	2
Hungary	2
Iraq	2
Kenya	2
Morocco	2
U.S. Virgin Islands	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Vietnam	2
Zimbabwe	2
Albania	1
Algeria	1
American Samoa	1 (*)
Bahamas	1
Bangladesh	1 (*)
Belgium	1
Costa Rica	1
Croatia	1
Egypt	1
El Salvador	1 (*)
Guatemala	1
Kuwait	1 (*)
Latvia	1 (*)
Lithuania	1
Maldives	1
Nepal	1 (*)
Nicaragua	1
Qatar	1
Singapore	1
Uzbekistan	1

American Samoa, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Kuwait, Latvia, and Nepal were single-view countries in February too; none of these were also single-view in January. Also hey, Singapore, what’s the deal? You should be cruising at like ten or more views. Let’s see what we can do about that.

WordPress figures I posted a mere 13,944 words in March, which shows what’s great about the Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing format, in that I fill the daily content hole without having to use so many words. Some of them I even use many times over. And it does so much of the work of writing funny parts on its own. I should find some more structures like that, or just go ahead and use it all year round.

If you’d like to be one of those who see what I do, please, come back here and read things! Or click on `Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ or `Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile Via Email’. The first will put this in your WordPress Reader, the other will put it in your e-mail reader. Or, if you’d like you can just add https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed to any RSS reader you have, and there’s a good chance you have one without realizing it. Follow that link and see what opens up. Never know.

MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 32

We have reached the end. Keith A—‘s Sonic the Hedgehog fan fiction Altered Destiny reached its conclusion, with Keith-turned-Chris set up in a nice new home on a new planet with a girlfriend and he’s now a cyborg raccoon and everything. What is there to do but share the concluding host sketch, and my final thoughts about the story, as seen in 1997.

The whole of the MiSTing of Altered Destiny should be at this link. I’ll share some last thoughts after this ends.

---

[ INT SOL. CROW, JOEL, and TOM are baking cookies. There’s an amazing mess of batter, flour, eggshells, and such all over the entire set. CROW is reading from a cookbook. ]

CROW: Add two tbsps baking powder.

TOM: Two tbsps?

JOEL: Two tablespoons, right. [ Sprinkles it into the central bowl; starts stirring. ]

CROW: No, two tbsps.

JOEL: Guys…

TOM: I’ve got the baking pans all greased up, Joel.

JOEL: Ah, good.

[ JOEL reaches under and pulls up the baking trays. JOEL starts dabbing spoonfuls of batter onto the trays. ]

JOEL: So, do you two feel like you learned anything from this fanfic?

TOM: Learned anything?

CROW: What’s to learn from *this*?

JOEL: Well, how about that sometimes you have to give up your comfortable old home in order to do something meaningful with your life?

CROW: Like Keith-slash-Chris did?

JOEL: [ Continuing to place cookies ] Yeah.

TOM: But all Keith gave up was certain, horrible death.

CROW: And the only meaningful thing he did with his new life was get a girlfriend.

JOEL: That’s still pretty meaningful. Okay, how about learning, like Sally and the other Mobians did, about not accepting matters at face value, and withholding judgement until one learns the full truth of a situation?

CROW: You mean the way they unquestioningly took Keith into their ranks, and later repeated it when he became Chris, without even a cursory questioning to determine if he presented any sort of security risk, as if they knew he was the protagonist?

JOEL: All right, guys. Maybe what you should really draw from the story isn’t something directly shown in the text, but rather in the questions raised by the storyline.

CROW: Like what?

JOEL: Well…

[ JOEL takes the baking trays and places them underneath the desk, as though putting them in the oven. ]

JOEL: How much trust can you extend to a person, and how does a stranger earn your trust?

CROW: Ooh. Or you could ask what that Death Egg thing had to do with the story.

TOM:Or, you could ask, Sonic the Hedgehog: Why? Why? Why why WHY Sonic the Hedgehog already?

CROW: Hey, if the Internet had gotten big a decade earlier they might have been inflicting "Pound Puppies" fanfics on us.

JOEL: [ Shakes his head, reaches under to pull out trays of baked cookies. ] You two are incorrigible.

CROW: So stop incorriging us.

JOEL: [ Eating one of the cookies. ] What do you think, sirs?

[ D13. DR. FORRESTER and TV’s FRANK are sitting; TV’s FRANK still in the cardboard car and covered with red paint; but they are trying to scrub him clean. Little progress has been made. ]

DR.F: You know something, Frank?

FRANK: What’s that, Clayton?

DR.F: They’ve got to be feeling pretty darned smug up there.

FRANK: Because you didn’t manage to crush their souls with another "Sonic the Hedgehog" fanfic?

DR.F: Grrr…anyway, yes, that’s the problem.

FRANK: Oh, I’m sure you have a plan.

DR.F: That I do, yes. You see, they can feel proud for having passed through this one…

FRANK: But you’ve got more lined up?

DR.F: More lined up than you can even imagine, Frank. More stories from this same author…

FRANK: Wow.

DR.F: More and more fans writing their very first fanfic every day…

FRANK: Oh, that can be painful.

DR.F: Yes…we’ve gone easy on them so far.

FRANK: I can imagine, yes.

DR.F: So we’re going to let them be lulled into a sense of security now.

FRANK: You can destroy them later, certainly.

DR.F: Precisely, Frank. Would you press the button, please?

FRANK: Glad to.

[ TV’S FRANK stands up; hits DR. FORRESTER with the front of his cardboard car. ]

DR.F: Oouch!

FRANK: [ Oblivious ] Where was that button?

[ TV’S FRANK turns around; hits DR. FORRESTER again. ]

DR.F: Aagh!

[ TV’S FRANK turns around again; hits DR. FORRESTER again. ]

DR.F: Ooorg!

FRANK: There it is.

DR.F: FRANK!

FRANK: Oops…

[ TV’S FRANK pushes the button. ]

                          \  |  /   
                           \ | /                         
                            \|/                        
                          ---o---                          
                            /|\                          
                           / | \                        
                          /  |  \ 
                            

[ * Pwooom * ]

Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its related characters and situations are trademarks of and Copyright 1997 Best Brains, Inc. "Sonic the Hedgehog" and "Sonic the Hedgehog" characters are trademarks of and Copyright Sega, Archie Comics, and DIC. All rights reserved. Use of copyrighted and trademarked material is for entertainment purposes only; no infringement on the original copyrights or trademarks held by Best Brains, Inc, Sega, Archie Comics, or DIC is intended or should be inferred. Remaining characters are Copyright their creators; and the original story as a whole is Copyright Keith A—. This MiSTing is intended solely for personal entertainment and is not meant to be an insult to the creators or fans of the Sonic the Hedgehog products, and certainly not to Keith A—, who knew what he was getting into when he mentioned he had some Sonic fanfics too. The "Eclectic/Cool, I collect stuff too" joke was originally
written by Ginger V. Tuttle for The Rutgers Review, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

> It was a detailed set of blueprints
>for something called a Death Egg.

---

So some last thoughts. My recollection is that I impressed Keith A— with having a concluding sketch that actually thought about the themes of the story, especially since he hadn’t thought there was much of a theme in it. There is some part of me that longs to be an English major, and always has. This sketch — and others like it in a lot of the fanfiction MiSTings I did — show off the part of me that, decades later, would strive to find good things to say about god-awful Jack Kinney Popeye cartoons and the like.

But there’s reason for it besides liking the stunt of finding this meaning. I don’t like just making fun of the source text. I chose to read it. In fact, went out of my way to make it part of my life. The actual show at least occasionally got stuck with something because they had a deadline and no better candidate films.

Also, it does bother me that doing MST3K fan fiction is a copyright infringement mess. You see the block of text, more or less copied from other MiSTers, at the end of this, and it’s all useless stuff. The only thing that could possibly excuse using Best Brains’s stuff is if I can do something that’s fair use. That’s normally things like using the original property for educational purposes or critiques or some kind of transformative effort that can’t be done without using the copyrighted material. The more a MiSTing uses the source material to think about something, the closer to fair use it gets.

Yes, I’m aware this only really excuses using the original fan fiction, the thing that gets critiqued the most explicitly, and that I didn’t need cover for since the author gave me permission. But could I do the criticism as well without Crow and Tom Servo and Joel Robinson delivering it? Maybe there’s an argument to be made there. I don’t know, and hope I don’t ever have to face it.

Though Keith A— was happy to have me MiST other of his stories I never did. I forget whether he never showed me another or whether I forgot to ask.

Joel making the much-discussed cookies was a thing I did because I love when a host sketch includes some unnecessary but visually appealing bit of business. Think of it as the Jiffy-Pop stuff in Eegah!, which might have been my most explicit model. Putting the tray under the desk and immediately pulling out a tray of baked cookies feels true to the show to me. My recollection is I worked out the riffs so that Crow and Tom Servo owed each other the same number of cookies, but what am I going to do, check my work? Someone else can do that. (They won’t.)

Next week: who knows?

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why does every comic look funny these days? December 2023 – March 2024

More likely than not, whatever strip you’re reading looks funny because of Mike Manley’s health problems. This forced him to take leave of The Phantom weekday edition as well as Judge Parker. The weekday Phantom has been drawn by Jeff Weigel and then Bret Blevins. Judge Parker, D D Degg observed at The Daily Cartoonist, is being filled in now (without credit) by Rod Whigham of Gil Thorp renown.

So some happy news: Manley posted to his Facebook that he’s scheduled to return to The Phantom with the strip for Monday, the 10th of June. I don’t know whether that coincides with the start of a new story. It may represent just being a comfortable margin. I have no word on when he’ll return to Judge Parker. I am also not clear whether Rod Whigham’s tenure at Judge Parker is just for the week — which, must admit, the Comics Kingdom redesign lets us see early — or is until Manley’s return.

So this should catch you up to mid-March 2024 in Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel and Bret Blevins’s The Phantom (Weekdays). You’ll find all my essays about the comic at this link, as well as any news, so if you’re looking for an explanation of what’s going on and it’s after June 2024 for you? Try there.

The Phantom (weekdays).

18 December 2023 – 9 March 2024.

Last time, we were looking at the denouement of Tony DePaul’s more-than-two-year story about the death of The Phantom. Spoiler: The Phantom does not die. But he does spend time wondering what he can learn from diverting what seems like his destiny. Despite everything, Savarna Devi does learn that her former enslaver, Constable Jampa, is in the Mountain City, and goes after him. She seems to shoot him dead, although there is room for deniability in case DePaul wants to tell of Devi keeping her promise not to seek vengeance. (I believe her sincerity in her promise, but this may be irresistible temptation.)

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 4th of January, 2024. So yes, we assume that Constable Jampa had a bad day here, but we can’t swear that it did happen that way. Watch for a future story to know.

---

With the 13th of January the sixth and final chapter of this story ended, and we began “The Chain”. It begins with something I imagine was a bit of DePaul teasing readers upset at so long an imaginary story: The Phantom talking about what a weird dream he had last night.

This was not the Wrack and Ruin story. No, the dream he has is of a story that ran from February to May 1953, a Sundays story also called “The Chain”. Tony DePaul wrote about this as his story began. Part of it is meant to re-evaluate a story that he found fundamentally flawed. (The essay’s well worth reading, not least for revealing stuff I didn’t know about Lee Falk’s career, including having a hand in bringing Paul Robeson to the stage in Othello.)

The important points of the 1950s “The Chain” are that our The Phantom is having a right lousy time of it, unable to stop a war between the Llongo and the Wambesi and feeling sorry for himself over it. In the 2020s “The Chain” our The Phantom — and his family — chuckle over the weirdness of him not even liking being The Phantom. (As ever, I’m more forgiving of the 1950s author in this. While one of The Phantom’s defining traits is that he enjoys being The Phantom and feels his work is worthwhile and appreciated, everyone’s entitled to sometimes doubting themselves.) In the 1950s/the dream, a previously unnoticed Bangallan named Woru tells the story that explains the previously unnoticed chain hung on The Phantom’s throne in Skull Cave.

It seems that a tinpot dictator of a prince spots the woman who’d become the 20th Phantom’s wife and has his lackeys kidnap her. The 20th Phantom rides to her rescue, of course, but gets caught. And chained to the water well, forced to walk in circles to pump water to the animals, right where his future bride can see but not help. 20th notices, though, that every rotation the chain gets caught a little bit on this one stone, and after months of work, the chain finally snaps. In one bound he’s free, his future wife’s free, the prince who cares about, and he brings the chain back as a reminder of the need for patience.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 13th of February, 2024. If you’re curious, the original strip with thunderbolt and ran the 3rd of May, 1953. You can compare the story to DePaul and Blevins’s remake by looking at the Sunday strips around there.

(In the 1953 story Woru also explains this is a lesson about humility, 20th Phantom having got himself captured by going in guns blazing and hugely vulnerable. This was relevant to the 21st Phantom, 1953 edition, as his troubles with the Llongo and the Wambesi amounted to being annoyed they wouldn’t stop the tribal war already! Don’t they know they’re embarrassing the white guy in the jungle? Although when he goes back, he mostly just demands the tribes talk to each other and doesn’t tell them how to be peaceful. Not The Phantom’s phinest hour but at least he figured how to use his reputation for good?)

Among the things Kit Junior and all criticize: if this is an important lesson the Phantom needed to learn, why not mention it when he’s growing up? Or in the Phantom Chronicles? Why entrust the story to a lone tribesman who might well die before passing the message on? And isn’t this more a lesson about perseverance, rather than patience? Are we sure this moral was narratively justified?

Kit Junior then thanks his father for teaching him and Heloise the things they need to know to be viable Phantoms. He mentions a story from 2006 — “The Jungle Trek” — in which he and Heloise are guided through a series of physical and, more, intellectual challenges. The only one he gets to here is a cliff-climbing exercise, where they lose their focus and come terribly near falling. Diana isn’t sure she wants to hear more, which, fair enough. Writing up this recap I see the thematic connection here, although I don’t have guesses about where that’s going.

Kit Junior, convinced that Heloise is just not coming back to the Deep Woods, plans to leave for Mawitaan despite knowing his sister’s trying to set him up with Kadia. But he comes back to talk with his father more. And that’s where we are today.

Next Week!

Another comic strip having a change of artist! But one that, so far as I know, is not related to health issues. It’s to be Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, Charles Ettinger and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy next Tuesday, all going to plan.

Statistics February: While the Comics Kingdom Website Dies Why Not Read About My Writing?

I know it’s early in March to be doing my statistical recap of the month before but I’ve got reasons. I might even know what they are. As you’d expect, my most popular posts in February were explanations of why Comics Kingdom was broken and passing on the news that your newspaper only runs comic strips by white guys who may have died in a previous century. The five most popular pieces — including two that were only up the last week of February meaning they had almost no time to be searched out and read — were:

• Comics Kingdom Is Broken Because They Redid the Web Site (120-Hour Warning)
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who is this ‘Ann Parker’? November 2023- February 2024
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Are Gil and Mimi Thorp Divorced? November 2023 – February 2024
• Your Newspaper Has Dropped Every Comic Strip by a Woman or Black Guy
• While Pondering a Smaller Injustice of the World

The most popular Statistics Saturday post was the one about US President Birthdays (Observed) and I hope it turns into something gradually misinforming people, honest as it all is.

Considering the number of views dropped back to ‘just about average’ it’s weird how much it looks like a plummet.

So I knew my streak of exceptionally well-read months couldn’t continue, but it’s still hard to take the crash back to normal. February was, it turns out, below average but only a tiny bit below. WordPress says there were 5,114 page views here in February, which is below the twelve-month running mean of 5,657.0 and running median of 5,374.5. That’s pretty close to average, especially if you prorate it for February being 1.4 days shorter than the twelve-month running average.

There’s a similar story with the number of likes given, with 86 of them in February compared to the mean of 100.3 and median of 98.5. Prorated to the length of the month that’s less of a drop than it looks. Comments, now, those plummeted again, with only 33 of them against a mean of 66.7 and median of 60.5. Well, that’s all okay.

Now, as ever, my comic strip coverage is my most popular writing. For right now, my plan is to do plot recaps for comic strips in my usual order, which would have it at:

• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (5th of March)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (12th of March)
• Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (19th of March)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (26th of March)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (2nd of April)

However. You notice that The Phantom and Prince Valiant are strips run on Comics Kingdom. I hope very much that in the next ten days they get Comics Kingdom up to the point that it’s possible to read comics on purpose. I really hope that within the next 25 days they manage the feat. But if they haven’t, then I’ll bump the Comics Kingdom strips down to a time when it’s not awful to do.

An amazing 96 countries viewed pages from me in February. 25 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

I totally get the Guayanas ignoring me. It’s Bolivia I can’t explain but also wasn’t asked to.

Country	Readers
United States	3,807
Canada	184
United Kingdom	152
Australia	99
Philippines	87
India	85
Brazil	79
Germany	51
Italy	48
Sweden	33
Georgia	28
France	27
South Africa	27
Mexico	19
Spain	18
Denmark	17
Netherlands	15
Russia	15
Austria	14
Poland	13
Thailand	13
Argentina	12
Finland	11
Norway	11
Singapore	10
Trinidad & Tobago	10
Uganda	10
Japan	9
Malaysia	9
New Zealand	9
Saudi Arabia	9
Cayman Islands	8
Czechia	8
Indonesia	8
Ireland	8
Romania	8
Turkey	8
Malta	6
Montenegro	6
Switzerland	6
Belgium	5
Greece	5
Peru	5
Hungary	4
Nicaragua	4
Slovenia	4
Tanzania	4
Ukraine	4
Chile	3
Dominican Republic	3
Ecuador	3
Israel	3
Nigeria	3
Puerto Rico	3
Serbia	3
South Korea	3
Taiwan	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Vietnam	3
Belarus	2
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Croatia	2
Egypt	2
Estonia	2
European Union	2
Honduras	2
Macao SAR China	2
Pakistan	2
Portugal	2
St. Kitts & Nevis	2
Uruguay	2
American Samoa	1
Antigua & Barbuda	1
Bangladesh	1
Bulgaria	1 (*)
Cambodia	1
Colombia	1
El Salvador	1
Faroe Islands	1
Guam	1
Hong Kong SAR China	1
Iceland	1
Kazakhstan	1
Kenya	1
Kuwait	1
Latvia	1
Lebanon	1
Mongolia	1
Nepal	1
North Macedonia	1 (*)
Oman	1
Papua New Guinea	1
Paraguay	1 (***)
Slovakia	1
Syria	1
Venezuela	1

Bulgaria and North Macedonia were single-view countries in January also. Paraguay has spent four months as a single-view country here.

WordPress calculates me as having published 16,200 words last month, a scant 558.6 words per post on average. January had been 639.6. So that’s why I’ve had so much more free time, it follows. I’m at 36,028 words for the year so far, as of the start of March.

I’m also as of the start of March at 416,861 page views from 235,154 unique visitors, this after 4,046 posts that have collected 6,582 comments altogether. These are certainly numbers, and if you’d like to see how the numbers change when we get to next month come on back around. Or click the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button on the navigation panel on the right side of this page. There’s also the option to have it e-mailed to you through the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile Via Email’ button. It claims there’s 1,593 subscribers to this blog, but I suspect some of them aren’t really engaged, the way I am.

Statistics January: How People Want Me To Explain Comic Strips To Them

You know what the start of a new month means: I should get around to sometime or other looking over my previous month’s readership figures. I’m on that a little earlier than usual this time, since it is such a short month.

WordPress figures I had 7,097 page views here in January 2024, which is my fourth-busiest month on record. I’m startled too, but it was a month that let me do both Phantom and Mary Worth recaps and people want both those comics explained a lot. This is, like you’d expect, way above the twelve-month running mean (5,535.7) and median (5,374.5) count of page views.

The story is almost the same in unique visitors. There were 3,746 of them logged in January, which I believe is the third-highest count on record. For me, I mean. Again, way above the running mean (3,172.9) and median (2,962.5).

The number of posts liked rose in January, too, topping out at 114. That’s a bit above the running mean of 101.2 and median of 98.5, which leaves me waiting for the other shoe’s drop. That shoe is a statistic, and that statistic is the number of comments. That dropped to 38, way below the running mean of 73.2 and median of 67, even though I was pretty good this time about not waiting forever to answer people who were kind enough to say something around here.

WordPress figures me as starting February with a total of 411,747 views from 232,111 unique visitors, spread over 4,017 posts and 6,549 comments.

Against expectations I did remember how to set it to a specific month range! I like that more than whatever exactly it was I had to do before.

As usual, the most popular things were comic strip news and, for some reason, the monthly statistics post. I’m a bit surprised the annual statistics post, for the whole of 2023, didn’t rate higher. Well, the five most popular things people looked specifically at were:

• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Has Karen Moy ever met a vegetarian? October 2023 – January 2024
• Comics Kingdom to Mess Everything Up Again
• Statistics Saturday: What You Think _Peanuts_ Specials Are Titled Vs What They Really Are
• Statistics December: People Like Me Having Good Opinions About Soup
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What’s with the Jungle Patrol safe? November 2023 – January 2024

The most popular of the long MiSTing segments was part 21, which was one of them, all right. I’m not sure it was the best of the set, but it was all right.

My plan for covering story strips in the month-or-so ahead is this, but I don’t promise that it will all come in on time and as planned. I’ve learned better by now:

• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (6 February)
• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (13 February)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (20 February)
• Emi Burdge and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye (27 February)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (what-have-you)

I should probably start work on that Gil Thorp recap now, but won’t.

So this time I got a better world map by magnifying the statistics page, like, eight times and taking a screenshot. It’s a bit hacky but it worked, so I’m content.

90 countries or country-ish things sent me readers in January. 20 of them sent me only a single page view, though. Can you spot which ones they are? And which are the three that were also single-view countries the month before?

Country	Readers
United States	5359
Canada	196
United Kingdom	166
India	116
Australia	115
Brazil	102
Peru	97
Poland	92
Italy	75
France	70
Sweden	64
Philippines	56
Germany	53
Finland	47
Georgia	27
Mexico	25
Spain	22
South Korea	21
Colombia	20
Norway	20
South Africa	19
Malaysia	17
Argentina	15
Japan	15
Ireland	13
New Zealand	13
Switzerland	13
Turkey	13
Costa Rica	12
Denmark	12
Cayman Islands	11
Hungary	10
Romania	10
Singapore	10
Ukraine	8
Indonesia	7
Israel	7
Kuwait	7
Netherlands	7
Russia	7
Uganda	7
Chile	6
Panama	6
Trinidad & Tobago	6
Vietnam	6
Croatia	5
European Union	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Bangladesh	4
Czechia	4
El Salvador	4
Guatemala	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Thailand	4
Uruguay	4
Algeria	3
Greece	3
Jamaica	3
Jordan	3
American Samoa	2
Austria	2
Brunei	2
Ecuador	2
Kazakhstan	2
Kenya	2
Nicaragua	2
Pakistan	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Slovakia	2
Sri Lanka	2
Angola	1
Aruba	1 (*)
Bahamas	1
Belgium	1
Bolivia	1
Bulgaria	1
Dominican Republic	1
Egypt	1
Laos	1
Lithuania	1
Martinique	1
Mozambique	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Nigeria	1
North Macedonia	1
Paraguay	1 (**)
Portugal	1
Puerto Rico	1
South Sudan	1
Taiwan	1 (*)

If you said the countries with a ‘1’ in the views column were the single-view countries, you’re right. Aruba, Paraguay, and Taiwan were single-view countries the month before, and Paraguay was a single view the month before that even. I’m flattered that Paraguay is sort of interest-ish in my writing but not working that hard at it.

WordPress figures I published 19,828 words last month. I somehow lost track of keeping that number last year so it’s nice to have it back. That comes to about 640 words per posting, which seems like a lot, especially considering how often the Statistics Saturday post is, like, a picture or a list of ten words or something slight like that. All that Popeye and Son talk. Oh yes, and what am I going to turn to reviewing once Popeye and Son is exhausted? … I don’t know, haven’t got plans that far ahead. I, too, am exhausted.

If you’d like to be exhausted daily alongside me, please do. This and every post should have a ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button on the navigation panel on the right side of the page. This is if you’re on the desktop version. If you’re looking at this on a phone … really? Huh. All right. I guess that’s normal these days, I just don’t understand it myself. You can also get these posts e-mailed to you, before I correct some of the worse typos, with a box that’s just beneath the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button. And don’t forget that you can use the https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed RSS feed with whatever your preferred reader is. It’s all good, don’t worry.

Statistics 2023: How The Last Year Treated My Humor Blog

One thing I like doing when the year starts is look over readership for the previous year. And between the What’s Going On In … essays, Statistics Saturday, the MST3K fan fiction, and for the time being two Popeye and Son reviews a week, publication slots for this sort of review vanish really fast. This is almost the first chance I have to look at what how and why things were read around here last year. Here goes, though.

WordPress tells me there were 66,428 page views here last year. This is a good-size number, five digits and everything. It’s smaller than 2022’s figure, though! There had been 70,038 page views in 2022. This is my first year-over-year drop since 2015-16. Still, 2023 is the second-greatest number of views around here in any calendar year.

Quick, can you spot the year when I started writing about how nothing was going on in Apartment 3-G and people flocked to my blog to find out why the comic made no sense anymore?

But the number of unique visitors — 38,088, WordPress estimates — is my largest unique visitor count ever. 2022 brought me only 36,714 visitors, almost the same number as 2021. I haven’t had a year-over-year decline there since 2015-16.

Still, the growing number of unique visitors despite the page views declining means people come around and decide they’ve had enough of me after fewer page views.

Where I have seen a drop is the number of likes. There were 1,212 likes given to stuff around here in 2023, the third-lowest per year on record. 2022 had brought me 1,790 (and 2021 had brought 1,768). I’m going to attribute this to the death of blogging as a pastime. I’ve never been close to the 2015 record of 4,134 likes.

The likes count doesn’t look like that much is changing until you consider that I had something like ten time as many page views in 2023 than I did in 2013, and then you know that I have gotten to be quite barely tolerable to my readers.

Ah, but where I am close to 2015’s record? Comments. There were 878 comments here last year, which is my second-highest number for a year. The highest? 2015, when there were 879 comments here. Right? 2018 is now the third-most-commented year around these parts, with 830 of them.

If I’d known I was this close to breaking the record I would have trolled Garrison with some quick conversation starters like cribbage or Snuffy Smith’s kangaroo or stuff.

What is popular around here? Comic strip plot recaps, mostly. The most-viewed page of my whole collection here in 2023 was this February 2019 Judge Parker plot recap. I don’t know why that’s become the default for people googling Judge Parker but, what the heck. I have it flagged so people know Judge Parker fans can get a more recent plot summary when they want.

The most popular things I posted in 2023, by their 2023 readings? Again, story comic recaps:

What’s Going On In Eye Lie Popeye? Also, what is Eye Lie Popeye? October – December 2022

What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? What’s this great idea you have for this essay? June – August 2023

What’s Going On In Judge Parker? How was that a detective story? December 2022 – March 2023

What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April Parker out of CIA jail? March – June 2023

What’s Going On In DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays)? Who is John X and why does Jungle Patrol care? April – June 2023

This by the way has brought me to learn that Eye Lie Popeye did not end its web comic run in early 2023, with the enticement to buy the comic book. Now that I know it’s still available, I’m happier. We’ll see what I do about recapping it.

My most popular original piece, not having anything to do with story comics, was the time where Finally I checked with an AI search engine which told me her name was Sally Mustang. I have no idea why that one should get singled out. Among the Saturday trifles most popular was Statistics Saturday: Answers To Every Question Asked Of Casey Kasem On American Top 40 in the 70s. (The circuit breaker one was the next-most popular.)

And finally the best-read piece of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction that I published in 2023 was The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Chapter 11. This is the one where Jimmy Rabbit comes to realize that Grumpy Weasel does not see their foot race as a fun, casual pastime. Also now I realize that in explaining my riffs I didn’t mention how something was a riff on the play/movie Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. Well, nobody wrote in to ask about it, so, never mind.

Which is the most surprising country to have had no page views: Haiti, any of the Guianas, Chad, or Turkmenistan?

Over the whole of 2023 there were 162 countries or country-like constructs sending me readers. This includes the mysterious ‘Unknown Region’ and counts places like American Samoa as not part of the United States. Once more, Greenland shuns me. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	49,124
Canada	2,011
United Kingdom	1,729
India	1,537
Australia	1,490
Brazil	1,245
Italy	787
Philippines	713
Germany	642
Spain	411
Finland	384
Sweden	382
France	341
Norway	338
Peru	279
Mexico	245
Denmark	241
Japan	205
Netherlands	173
New Zealand	173
South Africa	159
Argentina	156
Thailand	152
Colombia	146
Singapore	137
Poland	127
El Salvador	123
Ireland	122
Austria	116
Serbia	115
European Union	112
Indonesia	110
Malaysia	101
South Korea	91
Romania	88
Chile	72
Croatia	71
Czechia	70
Greece	69
Hong Kong SAR China	69
Kenya	67
Portugal	67
Belgium	66
Switzerland	66
Nigeria	65
Hungary	61
Saudi Arabia	61
Turkey	61
Pakistan	60
Russia	59
Slovakia	57
United Arab Emirates	57
Israel	49
Bangladesh	43
Jamaica	41
Taiwan	40
Ecuador	39
Puerto Rico	37
Costa Rica	36
Malta	33
Ukraine	33
Vietnam	30
Venezuela	29
Kuwait	26
Mali	25
Trinidad & Tobago	23
Dominican Republic	21
Guatemala	21
Egypt	20
Latvia	20
Uruguay	20
Estonia	19
Bosnia & Herzegovina	18
Algeria	17
Bulgaria	16
Morocco	16
Bolivia	15
Cayman Islands	14
Slovenia	12
Sri Lanka	12
Bahamas	11
Qatar	10
Iraq	9
Cambodia	8
Cuba	8
Panama	8
Paraguay	8
Barbados	7
Cyprus	7
Honduras	7
Jordan	7
Kazakhstan	7
Libya	7
Lithuania	7
Nepal	7
Guadeloupe	6
North Macedonia	6
Yemen	6
Zimbabwe	6
Albania	5
Belarus	5
Brunei	5
Georgia	5
U.S. Virgin Islands	5
Unknown Region	5
American Samoa	4
Belize	4
Gibraltar	4
Guernsey	4
Iceland	4
Lebanon	4
Luxembourg	4
Mauritius	4
Nicaragua	4
Oman	4
Sudan	4
Uganda	4
Aruba	3
Cape Verde	3
Fiji	3
Guam	3
Jersey	3
Kosovo	3
Maldives	3
Mongolia	3
Palestinian Territories	3
Papua New Guinea	3
St. Lucia	3
Angola	2
Bahrain	2
Botswana	2
China	2
Ethiopia	2
French Polynesia	2
Ghana	2
Montenegro	2
Seychelles	2
St. Vincent & Grenadines	2
Tanzania	2
Tunisia	2
Uzbekistan	2
Afghanistan	1
Antigua & Barbuda	1
Armenia	1
Azerbaijan	1
Benin	1
Bermuda	1
Cameroon	1
Curaçao	1
Faroe Islands	1
Iran	1
Kyrgyzstan	1
Lesotho	1
Madagascar	1
Martinique	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Réunion	1
Senegal	1
Sierra Leone	1
Solomon Islands	1
Togo	1
Zambia	1

I, too, cannot imagine what caused so many Peruvian readers to look at pages here. Maybe I said something about guinea pigs they wanted to see and, in the end, decide wasn’t worth refuting. I get it.

I’ve already shared my start-of-the-year statistics for total views and things like that so let me instead just urge folks to, if they like what they see here, join me as a regular reader. You can use the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button in the right column of the page here to do that. You can also have daily entries e-mailed to you. I do nothing with your e-mails (I don’t even see them), but I can’t promise what WordPress does. If you have an RSS reader, and there’s a good chance you do and don’t realize, you can use my feed as well. That’s an option which doesn’t turn up in my statistics, but that’s all right. There are other important things besides statistics.

Statistics December: People Like Me Having Good Opinions About Soup

New year, new chance to fall way behind on my resolution to answer comments promptly, or at least not so late that everyone forgets they ever read my blog. But it’s also a chance to look at what was popular around here, and maybe consider why. And learn not a thing from it. Because, according to WordPress, what did people really want to read from me this past month? Mostly, that time in May 2022 that I learned Dennis The Menace had a middle name and it wasn’t “The”. But among things that I posted for the first time in December? A bit of comic strip recapping. But also home repair and my first long-form original essay in years. The top five pieces were:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s with the art in The Phantom? September – December 2023
• Statistics Saturday: How Replacing the Caster Wheels on the Portable Dishwasher Is Going
• Statistics Wednesday: Special Caster Wheel Update
• And Then Chowders Are a Whole Book of Their Own
• In Which I Am Concerned About Kangaroos’ Nature Education

I got the replacement wheels on the dishwasher by the way, and it now rolls just as much as it should. Also portable dishwashers are great, but you should sweep the floor before rolling it back and/or forth. But I can’t do small home repair projects all the time. My Dad starts asking questions about what kind of spirit level I have.

Still, what I can do on purpose is write plot recaps for the story strips. My schedule, for now, is to take these comics in this order:

• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (9 January)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (16 January)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (23 January)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (30 January)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (37 January)

The plan is subject to change whenever I remember I should fit Flash Gordon in.

I almost forgot what I did to get it formatted nicely enough like this, but remembered just in time. I’d write it down here but I forgot again. Try catching me at the end of January, please.

This is qualitative, though. What about my quantitative values? WordPress tells me there were 6,143 page views in December. That’s a big drop from October and November. But it’s still well above the running mean of 5,523.7 for the twelve months leading up to December. Also above the median of 5,374.5. There were also 3,721 logged unique visitors, again a drop from the previous two months but above the running mean of 3,109.3 and running median of 2,905.

There were 98 things liked around here in December, which is above October and November but basically right on the running mean of 104.8 and running median of 102.5. I mean, that sort of difference is just noise and we know it. The number of comments fell to 44, the lowest in a year and way below the running mean of 76.9 and median of 75.5. But I was appalling in writing back all month, so that’s on me. And it’ll make it easier for me to beat the averages the coming month, so that’s something.

82 countries or country-like constructs sent me page views in December. 14 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the inexplicably popular roster:

Country	Readers
United States	4,676
Canada	241
United Kingdom	158
Australia	122
India	117
Brazil	93
Italy	45
Philippines	40
Germany	35
Mexico	35
Sweden	32
Thailand	31
Japan	30
Norway	28
Hungary	27
New Zealand	23
Malaysia	22
Finland	21
South Korea	20
France	19
Spain	19
European Union	18
Indonesia	13
Peru	13
Argentina	12
Saudi Arabia	12
Singapore	12
South Africa	12
Ireland	11
Netherlands	11
Pakistan	11
Poland	11
Denmark	9
Kenya	9
Croatia	8
Czechia	8
Jamaica	8
Portugal	7
Romania	7
Turkey	7
Cuba	6
Greece	6
Switzerland	6
Austria	5
Colombia	5
Vietnam	5
Libya	4
Puerto Rico	4
Qatar	4
Russia	4
Serbia	4
Belgium	3
Chile	3
Honduras	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Israel	3
Malta	3
Mauritius	3
Morocco	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Algeria	2
Bangladesh	2
Dominican Republic	2
Ecuador	2
Oman	2
Slovakia	2
Sri Lanka	2
Uganda	2
Albania	1
Aruba	1
Belarus	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Iceland	1
Mongolia	1
Montenegro	1
Paraguay	1 (*)
Slovenia	1
Solomon Islands	1
Taiwan	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Ukraine	1

Now this, I did remember what I did to get a fair-sized map, but trying to get it so the readership bar isn’t stuck there making the Pacific even wider is beyond me.

Paraguay was a single-view country two months in a row. No other country can make that claim without being a big fibber!

WordPress figures that I start 2024 with a total of 404,645 views that came from, overall, 228,364 unique visitors. They’d seen 3,986 posts and left 6,511 comments overall. I don’t know if that figure includes the “great post, very informational” thing that spammers put in the hopes that someday they’ll drive traffic to their blog about the Apollo program, sock-darning, turnip recipes, and Laos. Good luck with that and with whatever else this year’s going to toss at us.

Statistics November: People Still Turn to Me to Explain _Judge Parker_ to Them

That phenomenon in October where people were turning to this one particular Judge Parker recap from 2019? Yeah, that continued happening this month. It wasn’t as big a bump, but it did re-surge the week of the 6th, when April Parker met her mother in Super CIA Secret Jail Duper. If someone has advice on getting people from there to the most current plot recap, please share. I get information about what things are being read but have no idea how to turn that into something I can act on.

For the curious, the five most popular pieces published in November were, according to WordPress:

• Or Maybe _Real Life Adventures_ Has Really Ended for Real, Life
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why is that guy on a typewriter in the strip? August – November 2023
• Finally I checked with an AI search engine which told me her name was Sally Mustang
• I Can Hope This Has Got Their Impulse to Experiment With ‘Bad’ Out of Their System
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Did Saul Wynter leave Charterstone? August – October 2023
• Statistics September: People Have Questions About Judge Parker
• MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 12

Those five pieces turn out to be seven pieces because of a three-way tie for the last spot. Also, I just now realize that the recap of the October statistics I called “Statistics September” for no good reason. Sorry about that. Anyway it’s nice some of my original pieces get up there, even if it is things like me sulking about salt water taffy.

Also, hey, WordPress did improve their statistics system a bit. You can pick a custom range for the dates, so I can set it, like I did here, at exactly 24 months and see a reasonable range for monthly data. Can’t get it to go more than two and a half years, it looks like — which was the old range — but at least now if I decide I want to look at just, say, year-to-date, there’s a process.

As mentioned, this was a popular month around here. There were 7,496 page views, which I think is the third-most ever around here. They came from 4,347 unique visitors, which looks like it’s second only to October in the unique-visitor count. Either way that’s high. The twelve-month running mean of views leading up to November was 5,364.9 per month, from a running mean of 2,994.8 unique visitors. The running medians are a similar story: 5,374.5 views from 2,905 unique visitors, on average.

There were 70 likes given in November, which is below both the running mean of 109.1 and running median of 109.5. I didn’t think I was that hard to like that month. But we chatted some more, with 94 comments, compared to a mean of 78.9 and median of 75.5.

My readership will always, around here, depend on the comic strip plot recaps. To that end, here’s my plan for the rest of the year, subject as ever to events warranting:

• Shadia Amin, Emi Burdge, and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye (5 December)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (12 December)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (19 December)
• Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (26 December)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (33 December)

This is worse Africa coverage than usual, I think, but it is balanced by great South America reach, considering I’m far too provincial a writer to be of interest to anyone who isn’t already me.

There were 89 — or as the French put it, four twenties and ten minus one — countries sending me any page views in November. 22 of them — or as the French put it, twenty two — were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	5,709
Brazil	221
Canada	221
United Kingdom	196
Australia	189
India	151
Philippines	71
Italy	65
Spain	43
Peru	42
Germany	35
Argentina	32
Denmark	32
New Zealand	30
France	28
Austria	26
Mexico	26
Norway	26
Japan	19
Singapore	19
South Africa	19
Sweden	19
South Korea	17
Finland	14
Netherlands	12
Malaysia	11
European Union	10
Poland	10
Switzerland	10
Colombia	9
Croatia	9
Saudi Arabia	8
Slovakia	8
Czechia	7
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Kenya	7
Cayman Islands	6
Indonesia	6
Ireland	6
Venezuela	6
Hungary	5
Israel	5
Romania	5
Russia	5
Taiwan	5
Turkey	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Belgium	4
Bolivia	4
Guadeloupe	4
Jamaica	4
Qatar	4
Serbia	4
Algeria	3
Belize	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	3
Egypt	3
Kuwait	3
Thailand	3
Bulgaria	2
Kosovo	2
Lebanon	2
Nigeria	2
Pakistan	2
St. Vincent & Grenadines	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Vietnam	2
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1
Barbados	1
Brunei	1
Cambodia	1
China	1
Costa Rica	1
Ghana	1
Guernsey	1
Honduras	1
Lithuania	1 (**)
Madagascar	1
Malta	1 (*)
Nepal	1
North Macedonia	1 (*)
Oman	1
Paraguay	1
Portugal	1
Puerto Rico	1
Sri Lanka	1
Uzbekistan	1
Zimbabwe	1

Lithuania has been good for a single view three months running now. Malta and North Macedonia, two months. All the other places are on a single month streak.

WordPress calculates that at the end of November I had published 3,955 posts total, which had drawn 224,649 unique visitors who had read 398,519 pages all told. I’m willing to grant some of them just skimmed or looked at the comics. Ah, but then some of them were also bots with no actual reading capacity at all, and still more were LLMs scraping my writing to repackage it as “content”. So I look forward to someday seeing my list of imaginary eras of French history someday becoming the actual section headers on Wikipedia.

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why is that guy on a typewriter in the strip? August – November 2023

Show some respect, little one. That guy with the typewriter is Lee Falk, the creator of The Phantom and its sister strip Mandrake the Magician. Legend in the serial adventure comic business. Falk died in 1999, but his name remains in the credit box on the comic strips, I assume out of sentiment rather than because he had Bob Kane as his agent.

For some time now Tony DePaul has used Lee Falk as narrator, providing recaps and transitions and background material to readers who joined us late. I’m charmed by it. This story’s seen more of Lee Falk The Character than usual, including his speaking to the reader as though he weren’t sure what the story was. Tony DePaul has never been shy about discussing what he’s attempting in a story, as anyone reading his blog knows. So it can’t be DePaul wanting to find some way to talk about his writing process. The story as it’s told is about The Phantom himself creating a story, his audience being the Jungle Patrol. I imagine as we see more of it we’ll see some thematic echoes between Falk deciding how the story works and The Phantom working on his plans.

And that story we’ll see — well, I should pause a moment. The weekday Phantom, as well as Judge Parker, are going to be looking different for a while. Mike Manley, the regular artist, is ill and it looks like an extended absence, says The Daily Cartoonist. Bret Blevins (with lettering by Scott Cohn) have been filling in for a couple weeks on The Phantom, as they did for a while last year too. Jeff Weigel, who does the Sunday strips, is supposed to take over the weekday strips for the duration starting from later this month. Blevins has also taken on drawing Judge Parker, and I don’t know how long that’s to last.

Anyway if more news about the comic strip breaks, or you want to know about the weekday continuity, or you live in the year 2024 or later and want a more up-to-date plot recap for Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, try this link. What do you have to lose? Now on with the Sunday show.

The Sunday Phantom.

13 August – 5 November 2023.

Last time we were just started a new story, with The Phantom turning up at Jungle Patrol headquarters as “John X”, the Jungle Patrolman he became during a bout of amnesia a decade or so back. When he regained his memory he had John X taken off for special duty by the Unknown Commander of the Jungle Patrol, whom he happens to be. But during the raid on Gravelines he discovered Jungle Patrol is getting all weird about John X. It’s like the Unknown Commander can’t even scoop people up into his Mysterious Department of Magic without people asking questions. Such as, hey, wouldn’t that interlude and the phone calls from the Gravelines raid make sense if John X were the Unknown Commander?

This story, by the way, is set some time after the conclusion of the story going on in the weekday strips. This gets neatly teased when Jungle Patrol folks as John X for more information about Gravelines, and he says that story’s not yet over. I’m amused.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 3rd of September, 2023. This is not the best one-strip summary of things. But it does very well at showing the most interesting part here, the icon of Lee Falk pondering the writing process. It does make me wonder if the story was created by Tony DePaul thinking it would be interesting if John X told tales about the Unknown Commander, and then went about thinking how that would make sense. Also, I learn from Wikipedia that Lee Falk did look kinda like Mandrake the Magician. I suppose it’s really the other way around — Falk designed his character around himself — but it’s surprising to see and also to learn that he was a playwright and directed on stage Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Chico Marx, and Ethel Waters. Right? That was my expression.

Somehow, The Phantom sees an angle to prove John X isn’t the Unknown Commander, and maybe burnish the Unknown Commander’s legend some, since after a couple centuries not being seen even experienced Jungle Patrollers start asking questions like “how does this work exactly?” So we learn, from flashback conversations with Diana, that he’s been going into Mawitaan and meeting people with Ajabu Engineering (“You Imagine It, We Build It”). And he’s readying some spectacle for the Jungle Patrol’s benefit.

Meanwhile, what he tells Colonel Worubu and the Jungle Patrol staff is that he’s not sure but someone he thinks was the Unknown Commander died in a mission in Ivory Lana. And, sure enough, nobody’s been picking up the daily reports in the Unknown Commander’s vault, nor has the light signalling fresh orders turned on. As John X, he tells Colonel Worubu of how much the Unknown Commander depends on him and his expert judgement. And he scouts Jungle Patrol headquarters, looking for a good way he-as-John-X can vanish and set up whatever he-The-Phantom has in mind.

How will this all pan out? I don’t know. I imagine we’ll have some insight in twelve or thirteen weeks, whenever I get back to this strip. In the meanwhile …

Next Week!

Why are we watching infomercials in Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D.? You’ll have to check back here to learn or catch up on the comics yourself. We’ll see what happens.

Statistics September: People Have Questions About Judge Parker

For some reason Google decided that everyone in the world wanted to read a February 2019 What’s Going On In Judge Parker plot recap. I’m not saying they shouldn’t read it, if you want to know the goings-on of four and a half years ago. But this one essay got 1,433 views, way beyond any other particular piece. It buried this one October 2020 admission that I only that day got a particular Far Side comic.

I imagine underlying this is that Judge Parker reached a climax in its current story, with an international crimelord deciding to run for mayor of Cavelton, and Google decided people wouldn’t understand my most recent plot recap without way too much backstory. Remember, Google searches are actually more effective and correct than they’ve ever been, and you’re just imagining it that it sucks now, say Google spokescreatures, in a steady monotone and verbatim.

But those are old posts. What were the most popular things published this past month, among my readers? According to WordPress’s statistics, it’s this quintet, which had normal-looking numbers of clicks:

• The Comic Strip Industry Is Why I’m Late Today
• And Now There’s a New _Flash Gordon_ Comic Strip Coming?
• The Humiliating Thing Is I Don’t Even Expect Any Mail
• Statistics Saturday: OK But It’s This Weekend That It’s Time Change And Is It The One Where You Can Do Stuff An Hour Later
• Flash Gordon looks weird because it has a new artist. Spider-Man looks gone because it’s gone

Oh, also WordPress went and changed how the statistics page looks, so that it’s needlessly harder to get something like this where I look at a couple years’ worth monthly figures. But in trade for this you get … to have to fiddle around more with the stupid thing to get the same data you used to, and you can’t use the left/right arrow keys to get pictures for older months anymore.

So the Anomalous Judge Parker Google Incident juiced my statistics, giving me my fourth-highest readership month on record by page views, and my second-highest by number of unique visitors. There were 7,020 page views around here in October, way above the twelve-month running mean of 5,228.2 and twelve-month running median of 5,368. There were 4,594 unique visitors recorded, also way above the running mean of 2,846.3 and the running median of 2,836. Also hey, a rare month where the running median did not end .5, that’s comfortable.

All those readers, it won’t surprise you readers to know, didn’t do more than get a page view. There were 80 likes given around here in October, a drop from the month before and considerably under the mean of 114.6 and median of 114.5. Hey, there’s that .5 back. And there were 63 comments, a slight increase from September, but still below the mean of 80.5 (again with the .5’s) and median of 81.

I regret a little that folks have to wait so long for my next round of Judge Parker explanations. My plan for the month ahead is these strips, in this order:

• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (7 November)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (14 November)
• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (21 November)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (26 November)
• Emi Burdge and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye

So first, yes, that’s a new name on Olive and Popeye; Emi Burdge has taken over the “Olive” half from Shadia Amin. Second, I do figure to fit the revived Flash Gordon in, but I haven’t decided when. It seems that it’s the same continuity, Sundays and weekdays, so that’s one less essay at least. (But the Sunday-only strips are the easy ones.)

Meanwhile, to the countries report:

Do you like how the map is almost big enough to be useful? It turns out if you zoom in like eight times on the page it becomes kind of useful-ish. Similarly, if you zoom in Comics Kingdom’s page like six times, you still can’t read the Sunday comics, because they never tested their page on an actual computer.

84 countries or things as good as countries sent me views in October. As ever, most of them were the United States, United Kingdom, India, or Canada. There were way more from Brazil than usual, though. Here’s the total roster:

Country	Readers
United States	5,594
Brazil	234
United Kingdom	163
Canada	140
India	131
Australia	118
Italy	117
Philippines	63
Spain	35
Germany	29
Peru	25
France	22
Mexico	21
Finland	20
Singapore	19
Sweden	18
Norway	16
South Africa	14
Thailand	14
Poland	13
Taiwan	12
Greece	10
Austria	9
Romania	9
Belgium	8
Czechia	8
Netherlands	8
Uruguay	8
Denmark	7
Ireland	7
Argentina	6
Indonesia	6
Portugal	6
Chile	5
Colombia	5
Dominican Republic	5
Russia	5
Turkey	5
Bulgaria	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
New Zealand	4
Serbia	4
Slovenia	4
South Korea	4
Switzerland	4
Trinidad & Tobago	4
Croatia	3
El Salvador	3
Israel	3
Japan	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Botswana	2
Egypt	2
Jamaica	2
Kenya	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Venezuela	2
Aruba	1
Belize	1
Cayman Islands	1
Estonia	1 (**)
Gibraltar	1
Guatemala	1
Iran	1
Jersey	1
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1
Lithuania	1 (*)
Malaysia	1
Mali	1
Malta	1 (*)
Mongolia	1
Montenegro	1
Nepal	1
Nigeria	1
North Macedonia	1
Pakistan	1
Panama	1
Réunion	1
Sierra Leone	1
St. Lucia	1
Tanzania	1
Uganda	1
Ukraine	1

Lithuania and Malta have been single-view countries for two months now, and Estonia three. No other countries are on a longer streak.

WordPress figures I started November with a lifetime total of 391,010 page views from 220,289 unique visitors. That sounds about right to me. If you’d like to be a regular reader, apparently, just stand around some and let Google read you a Gil Thorp plot recap from 2018. I blame this on Twitter.

Statistics September: Well, I can’t blame this one on Twitter

Thought I forgot about looking over the past month and throwing up great heaps of numbers at the audience, did you? No, I just didn’t have a good chance to spend the time to compile this, except on days when something was already booked, like the MiSTing nights or the What’s Going On In … essays. Also the numbers kind of sucked, but that’s never stopped me before.

So in September, WordPress claims, there were 4,629 pages viewed here. That’s way down from last month, and below the twelve-month running mean of 5,443.8 views per month and the median of 5,385.5 views per month. That’s the sort of drop I had blamed on Twitter ending the ability of WordPress to announce posts, only here there’s no clear reason. It’s also the first time in ages that the month had fewer views than a year ago that month did. The unique visitor count dropped too, down to 2,605. The running mean was 2,953.3 and running mean 2,905. That’s also below a year ago September, although it is well above the two-years-ago September count. I can wring something out of most anything.

I wonder what the map will do the month I ever get a page view from Antarctica.

Likes were down a little, to 99. That’s against a running mean of 119.9 and running median of 118.5. Comments were down to 57, against a running mean of 82.4 and running median of 81, both of which seem higher than it feels like to me.

What’s popular around here, so far as anything is? My weird thing about Beetle Bailey, of course. That and more comic strip news. The five most popular pieces published in September were:

• Guy Who Draws _Beetle Bailey_ In Squirrel Game Of Cat And Mouse With Me
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is everyone in Judge Parker stupid? June – September 2023
• It really looks like _Fred Basset_ has ended
• Statistics August: Am I Still Blaming Twitter For Everything?
• Two Conversations With My Car

And last week I shard my plan for comic strip recaps this month, so no sense repeating that. I’m not picking up Flash Gordon until it comes in new, that’s all that’s important to say there.

So I realized I could make the map of the world bigger if I zoomed in the web page a couple times. Not one more than that, because that made the map shrink again, but a couple times. Why that, and not just have the map reach the horizontal width of the web browser instead? Because modern web developer theory is that the web is not a place to see anything, it’s a place to screenshot stuff.

85 countries or country-ish things sent me page views in September. 26 of them were single-view countries. That’s fine by me. I like 26. It’s always seemed auspicious to me. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	3,521
Canada	128
United Kingdom	114
India	99
Philippines	89
Australia	73
Brazil	69
Italy	66
Serbia	43
Germany	35
Peru	32
Spain	30
France	17
Netherlands	15
Japan	14
New Zealand	14
Norway	14
Thailand	14
Finland	13
Singapore	13
Ireland	12
Indonesia	11
Mexico	11
South Africa	11
Sweden	11
Chile	8
Colombia	7
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Kenya	7
Denmark	6
Malaysia	6
Pakistan	6
Russia	6
El Salvador	5
Portugal	5
Nigeria	4
Saudi Arabia	4
Switzerland	4
Taiwan	4
United Arab Emirates	4
Vietnam	4
Austria	3
Bahamas	3
Bangladesh	3
Greece	3
Maldives	3
Paraguay	3
Poland	3
Puerto Rico	3
South Korea	3
Turkey	3
U.S. Virgin Islands	3
Argentina	2
Belarus	2
Cambodia	2
Ecuador	2
Jordan	2
Romania	2
Ukraine	2
Algeria	1 (**)
Belgium	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Bulgaria	1
China	1
Costa Rica	1
Croatia	1 (*)
Czechia	1
Dominican Republic	1
Egypt	1
Estonia	1 (*)
Ethiopia	1
European Union	1
Faroe Islands	1
Hungary	1
Iceland	1
Israel	1
Lesotho	1
Lithuania	1
Malta	1
Slovenia	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Unknown Region	1
Uzbekistan	1
Venezuela	1
Zambia	1

Croatia and Estonia have been single-view countries two months in a row. Algeria’s been a single view three months in a row. And that’s it; Iraq dodged being a four-month country by sending me no page views whatsoever. … I guess that’s one way.

WordPress estimates that I started October with having gotten 383,987 views altogether from 215,697 unique visitors. I like how those sevens have lined up. I’d be glad having you as a regular reader, or commenter, or even liker, depending on what you find comfortable. For me, it’s maybe doing a little less of everything that’s like this, but you might be different in one or more ways.

You know what? I’m going to blame this on Twitter anyway. They deserve it and it’s not like I do.

Statistics August: Am I Still Blaming Twitter For Everything?

Sure. Why aren’t you? It’s correct. Everything going wrong right now, is considerably worse thanks to Twitter. Just saying.

Anyway, on to another month of looking at my readership without benefit of WordPress posting a link on my otherwise defunct Twitter account. Once more I saw the total page views, and the number of unique visitors, rise over the previous month. Also for the first time since the great Twitter Nerfing, my readership was back above the twelve-month running averages. Here’s the specifics.

I can’t help noticing that every month this past year I’ve had more unique visitors, and — except for May and June — more page views than I did in November 2015, the month that Apartment 3-G died and I got an anonymous mention from an old friend in The AV Club. You sure would think that would leave me feeling happy and accomplished.

WordPress tells me there were 5,610 page views in August. The running mean for the twelve months leading up to August 2023 was 5,507.6, and the running median 5,385.5. As someone who’d like to be popular without doing much, I like that. I can make it down, though: August 2022 was one that saw 6,375 page views here. It was helped by a spike of people wondering if The Phantom was dead. (Remember when that story was going on?)

These views came from 3,078 recorded unique visitors. That, too, beats the running averages. The mean was 2,971.2 and the median 2,905. Once again a nice trend. Also once again below August 2022’s figure of 3,292 unique visitors. People really want to know if The Ghost Who Walks is dead. Once again, gang, the “Man Who Cannot Die”.

There were 106 things liked around here, at least liked enough to click the ‘like’ button. That’s below the running mean of 128.3 and running median of 122.5. And, of course, August 2022’s 206 likes. Ah, but things turn around when we look to comments, as there were 89 given and received here in August, above the mean of 80.1 and median of 80. And way beating out August 2022’s mere 61, for once.

And what did peple like to read about? Well, whether The Phantom was dead and who this John X fellow is. Also how there was this Far Side comic I only understood in October 2020. Among the things published for the first time in August, though, the most popular pieces were:

• Statistics Saturday: Your Home’s Circuit Breakers
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? What’s Content-Warn-worthy about Mary Worth THIS time? May – August 2023
• Ginger Meggs, Only Australian Comic Strip I Could Name, Ended (someone gave this post a one-star review and I don’t know if they didn’t like the news or didn’t like my presentation of it)
• Statistics July: I Continue To Blame Twitter For Screwing Up My Readership (I always feel weird whenever these are popular)
• Meanwhile in Unexpected Panda-monium

I’m surprised only one comic strip report got into my top five this month. They’re always popular. My What’s Going On In … essays for the next few weeks I plan to be:

• Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye (12 September)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (19 September)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (26 September)
• Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (Designated Hitter)

As ever, these are subject to change or just my being late.

You’d think it would be easy to get a larger map of the world and a smaller map of the white spots off the eastern and western edges of the world, but that would require someone who designed the WordPress statistics page to ever look at the web page and see whether it was any good.

86 countries (yes, 99) sent me page views last month. Here’s the always curiously popular roster:

Country	Readers
United States	4,046
Canada	220
Australia	187
United Kingdom	121
India	113
Philippines	79
Sweden	68
Brazil	57
Italy	54
Germany	45
Spain	42
Finland	32
Denmark	31
France	28
Norway	26
Ireland	25
South Africa	25
Mexico	23
New Zealand	23
Malta	22
Netherlands	22
Peru	19
Latvia	15
Nigeria	15
El Salvador	14
Czechia	12
Indonesia	12
Japan	12
Costa Rica	11
European Union	10
Malaysia	10
Thailand	10
Kuwait	9
Pakistan	9
Singapore	9
Belgium	8
Chile	8
Serbia	7
Greece	6
Romania	6
Turkey	6
Vietnam	6
Argentina	5
Bosnia & Herzegovina	5
Colombia	5
Guatemala	5
Poland	5
Bangladesh	4
Israel	4
Kenya	4
Russia	4
South Korea	4
United Arab Emirates	4
Bolivia	3
Cayman Islands	3
Cyprus	3
Egypt	3
Hungary	3
Portugal	3
Yemen	3
American Samoa	2
Austria	2
Barbados	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Lithuania	2
Panama	2
Puerto Rico	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Slovakia	2
Switzerland	2
Ukraine	2
Afghanistan	1
Algeria	1 (*)
Benin	1
Cambodia	1
Croatia	1
Estonia	1
Iraq	1 (**)
Mali	1 (*)
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Papua New Guinea	1
Qatar	1
Senegal	1
Taiwan	1
Uganda	1
Uruguay	1 (*)

15 of them were single-view countries. Algeria, Mali, and Uruguay were single-view countries last month too, and Iraq’s given me a single view three months in a row now. I don’t know what’s got me so popular in Sweden. Fans of The Phantom? No telling.

I started September with 379,361 total views, from 213,090 unique visitors. Sorry I missed you, number 213,048. If you’re looking to avoid getting called out as reader number 214,832, try reading these essays from their RSS feed. Or, if you’d rather, sign up to read them by e-mail. Otherwise you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button and have posts appear in your WordPress Reader, if that’s still going strong. Or just hit ‘refresh’ on my home page a lot. That counts as reading too, and isn’t that all we’re looking for? Thank you. Back to the MiSTing tomorrow.

Statistics July: I Continue To Blame Twitter For Screwing Up My Readership

My readership figures rose in July. They’re still below what they were up through April of this year, that is, before Twitter broke the service that posted announcements of new blogs there. This doesn’t seem to quite hang together, though. My mathematics blog had a similar drop at the same time, but it hasn’t had any publication, or announcements, since last September.

Still, to numbers. There were 4,847 pages viewed here in July. This is the third month of increase, but still below the twelve-month running mean of 5,497.6. It’s also below the running median of 5,385.5. There were 2,743 recorded unique visitors, also a three-month increase. But also still below the running averages, in this case, a mean of 2,967.6 and median of 2,905.

The trend is up, though, which seems good. Also I noticed that compared to previous Julys? I’ve been increasing page views and unique visitors year-over-year since at least 2018. (I didn’t keep these numbers around before 2018 and I’m not going to go dig them out now.) That might be a better measure of long-term behavior than even twelve-month running averages.

WordPress also tells me that I got a couple dozen views referred to here by other sites including something called ‘ilxor’ and something else called ‘lens.google.com’, so apparently there’s a thing called lens.google.com that’s probably been shut down already.

Likeability and comment-worthiness were below average again. It’s me; you’re all doing great writing as much as you do and I appreciate it. There were only 98 likes given to anything in July, though, below the running mean of 128.4 and running median of 122.5. There were 71 comments, below the mean of 76.3 and the median of 80. The likes are below where they were for July 2022 and July 2021. Comments are well above July 2022, but way below July 2021. I shouldn’t start tracking year-over-year things. It starts eating up time and it’s not like I learn anything from this besides that people want me to explain that The Phantom is not dead.

Speaking of which, here’s the most popular things published in July. The Phantom once again leads the list. It may have been juiced by the Sunday continuity starting a new story with John X and likely leaving people wondering who that is. Here’s the top seven, since there was once more a three-way tie for fifth:

• What’s Going On In DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays)? Who is John X and why does Jungle Patrol care? April – June 2023
• Did Gary Larson Know What a Particular Amusement Park Ride Looks Like?
• Peter Parker Has Been Napping on the Plane Almost Four and a Third Years Now
• In Which I Don’t Know What This Means Either
• Also, if You Need a Couple Pews, Apparently You Can Just Snag a Couple Pews
• Statistics Saturday: Answers To Every Question Asked Of Casey Kasem On American Top 40 in the 70s
• In Which Pittsburgh Obliterates My Chain of Thought

I’m a little surprised none of the MiSTing reached the top five, but maybe people like my modern Arthur Scott Bailey stuff more than late-90s collaborative riffing. Certainly his Sleepy-Time Tales are more pleasant reading.

My plan for the What’s Going On In … series of story comics recaps is:

• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (8 August)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (15 August)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (22 August)
• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (29 August)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (5 September)

As ever, this is subject to change or delay because Tuesdays have been busy lately.

There were 82 whole countries, or country-like things, sending me readers in July. 18 of them gave me a single page view each, for 18 page views total. Here’s that roster:

Really, really love how the world map is scaled to perfectly fill the screen width of an iPod Touch and not under any circumstances the 16-inch MacBook Pro that I actually use to read things when I care about seeing them. Comics Kingdom, you listening? (No, you’re not.)

Country	Readers
United States	3,452
United Kingdom	275
Canada	142
India	122
Brazil	110
Germany	88
Australia	82
Finland	63
Italy	43
Philippines	41
France	33
Netherlands	25
Portugal	22
Denmark	18
Spain	17
Sweden	16
Thailand	16
Japan	15
Peru	14
Ecuador	13
Argentina	12
Norway	11
Costa Rica	10
Malaysia	10
United Arab Emirates	10
Ireland	9
Austria	8
Croatia	8
Kenya	8
Mexico	8
Colombia	7
Greece	7
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Indonesia	7
Serbia	7
Chile	6
El Salvador	6
Venezuela	6
Belgium	5
Estonia	5
New Zealand	5
Poland	4
Egypt	3
European Union	3
Guernsey	3
Hungary	3
Jamaica	3
Jordan	3
Malta	3
Singapore	3
South Africa	3
South Korea	3
Switzerland	3
Vietnam	3
Albania	2
Angola	2
Bangladesh	2
Kuwait	2
Luxembourg	2
Pakistan	2
Puerto Rico	2
Russia	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Unknown Region	2
Algeria	1
Aruba	1
Belarus	1 (*)
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Brunei	1
Dominican Republic	1
Honduras	1
Iraq	1 (*)
Israel	1
Lebanon	1
Lithuania	1
Mali	1
Morocco	1
Nicaragua	1
Sri Lanka	1 (***)
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Ukraine	1
Uruguay	1

Belarus and Iraq have spent two months sending me a single view each. Sri Lanka has been at this four months in a row. And the mysteriously-named Unknown Region doubled its readership from the month before.

I started the month at 373,751 views here, from a recorded 210,011 unique visitors. Sorry to whoever was number 210,000 that I didn’t say anything, but I might have been out at the time or something. And I have published 100,785 words so far this year. It seems late in the year to reach that mark, although I guess most years I finish a little over 200,000, so I’m not that far below average yet.

Those who’d like to read more like this and maybe be page read number 375,000 won’t be, if they use the RSS feed at https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed to get essays. Nor if they sign up by e-mail to get posts sent them. But if they “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” as that button suggests, they … I don’t know. Maybe they show up? I’m not sure how it counts things. Maybe next month I’ll know, but I doubt it.

Statistics June: How Another Month of Twitter’s Screwups Messed Up My Popularity

We’re on to the second full month without the service that posts tweets announcing new posts working. And it’s well past time I looked at how my readership looked during that second month. I just didn’t have the chance last week for reasons that make sense to me. Anyway WordPress didn’t get around to e-mailing me with the news that it was a great month for my blog until today, so let’s see whether they were right.

WordPress tells me there were 4,506 page views here in June, which is a small increase from May, when the Twitter links went away. It’s a drop from the twelve-month running mean of 5,516.4 views per month, though, as well as the median of 5,385.5 views per month. There were a recorded 2,615 unique visitors, which is similarly below the running mean of 2,978.2 and running median of 2,905 unique visitors.

So I can look at 4,500 readers and feel like that’s a drop and that’s still more readers than I got in the typical month through to about October 2020, a year when I still didn’t feel like I was reaching my potential as a writer of things. This is known as the anhedonic treadmill.

Some over-performing news: there were 134 things liked here in June. That beats the twelve-month running mean of 129.2 and way outpaces the running median of 122.5. So that’s nice. I get back below average in comments, though, with only 47 given or received around here. The mean was 75.8 and median 80. Still, I think they were good comments this past month so I’m holding on to that.

Most popular among my June-published posts last month were these, with a tie for the fifth-most-popular piece:

• Why You Might Want to Not Read _Mary Worth_ a Couple Weeks
• I Understand There Was an Apple Thing Today
• In Which I Am Foiled as Usual
• But the Main Thing, I Suppose, Is
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April Parker out of CIA jail? March – June 2023
• Statistics Saturday: Maximum Safe Viewing Distances

That warning about Mary Worth still stands, by the way. The strip has been doing a story with pet endangerment. If that’s a sensitive topic for you right now, sure, you may be able to laugh off the mean streets of Charterstone. But why put yourself to the hassle? You’re busy, you’ve got better stuff to do than have to recover from Mary Worth.

Speaking of, I will be reading Mary Worth, and the other story strips. More, I’ll be turning them into plot recaps, posted on a schedule that looks like this:

• Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (July 11)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (July 18)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (July 25)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (August 1)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (August 8)

Oh, I should get started on Dick Tracy then.

Once again, WordPress figures I want a world map that’s really small. I can get a larger map on the main statistics page, but that one doesn’t color in the less-popular countries. It all invites the question, does WordPress want me to go reconstruct all this with my own GIS tools instead? Because I promise you, I know how to do that and I will not.

There were 76 countries, or things as good as countries, sending me readers in June. 15 of them were single-view countries such as North Macedonia or Unknown Region. To be specific:

Country	Readers
United States	3,162
Australia	173
Canada	130
India	123
Brazil	109
United Kingdom	91
Peru	84
France	57
Italy	56
Germany	48
Philippines	34
Norway	33
Finland	26
Nigeria	24
South Africa	24
Mexico	21
Spain	21
Turkey	18
Japan	16
Singapore	14
Romania	12
Sweden	12
Thailand	11
Czechia	10
New Zealand	10
Russia	10
Ireland	9
Israel	9
Switzerland	9
Netherlands	8
Chile	7
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Pakistan	7
United Arab Emirates	7
Colombia	6
Indonesia	6
Poland	6
South Korea	6
Argentina	5
Denmark	5
Ecuador	5
European Union	5
Jamaica	5
Bangladesh	4
Croatia	4
Portugal	4
Puerto Rico	4
Ukraine	4
Costa Rica	3
Hungary	3
Kenya	3
Taiwan	3
Austria	2
Bahamas	2
Belgium	2
Bolivia	2
Bulgaria	2
Georgia	2
Greece	2
Malaysia	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Barbados	1
Belarus	1
Cyprus	1
Egypt	1 (*)
Iraq	1
Kosovo	1
Mali	1
Morocco	1
North Macedonia	1
Qatar	1
Serbia	1
Slovenia	1
Sri Lanka	1 (**)
Unknown Region	1
Vietnam	1 (*)

Egypt and Vietnam have been single-view countries two months in a row now. Sri Lanka’s been one for three months, at least so far as I’ve been tracking.

If you’d like to be a regular reader here, you can sign up to get posts delivered by e-mail, using the little box in the upper right corner to ”Follow _Another Blog, Meanwhile_ via Email”. Or you can use the button above that and add Another Blog, Meanwhile to your WordPress reader. You can use https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed in your RSS reader to get essays in your own reader, too. You probably know how you’d like to see my writing. Thanks for seeing this.

Statistics May: How Twitter Knocked Out My Readership Last Month

I have not used my @Nebusj account on Twitter in years. Safari decided it wanted to interact with it very slow, if at all, and while I could have just used Firefox instead I didn’t. Since that time, all I’ve tweeted there has been from an automated post relay that WordPress offers. Well, recently, Elon J Fudd, Billionaire, who owns a mansion and a web site, decided to charge way lots more for the tools to run this service. And the service said, ‘nah’, and shut down in the middle of the month. So my biggest act of promoting myself, letting this automated tweet go out once a day, vanished mid-month.

So this should explain why my readership was way down in May. According to WordPress there were 4,451 page views here in May, the lowest monthly total in a year. And there were a mere 2,537 unique visitors, also the lowest monthly total in a year. Seems easy to explain, doesn’t it? The loss of that link sank me below the 5,385.5 views and 2,905 unique visitors I’d have expected as the median monthly readership. Or the 5,510.3 views and 2,975.2 views and visitors of the arithmetic mean month. Easy!

It bothers me that I didn’t get to take the snapshot one minute sooner, so I wouldn’t have the empty bar of June 2023 hanging around the right there. But no, I don’t have any reason to think I’m not basically neurotypical, why do you ask?

Only maybe not so. WordPress lets me look at readership figures by day, by week, and by month, and the daily and weekly figures have a weird result. They don’t look much different before May 16th — the Twitter cutoff — and after. The two full weeks after the 16th were busier than the two full weeks before. If I am missing “deserved” readers, it looks more like because I didn’t have an extraordinary peak week, like I did around Easter with the Easter-egg-dye-color report. Well, not every month can be me patiently explaining to readers that no, The Phantom is not dead.

What was most popular around here in May? Me admitting I only got this one Far Side in 2020. But of the things published in May, here’s the top five viewed pieces:

• Did I Just Discover Something About Charlie Brown’s Family?
• The Guy Who Draws _Beetle Bailey_ Has Seen More Squirrels
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? How could Walt Wallet have met Abraham Lincoln? February – April 2023
• MiSTed: The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Chapter 25
• Starting to Think the News May Be Bad

And, of course, what people consistently want to know about are the story comics and what’s happening in them. My plan for the next couple weeks is to cover these comics, in this order:

• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (13 June)
• Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye (20 June)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (27 June)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (4 July)
• Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (11 July)

I’m still experimenting with Olive and Popeye as part of the rotation; I’m not sure it has quite enough story to deserve this. But I’ve been rooting for Popeye to return to the pop culture so will give him a chance. I’m also really, really thinking about doing Rip Haywire recaps. Going to have to see if I can do a test run on that.

Again, I’m sorry the map isn’t larger, but for some reason WordPress thinks the important thing is having plenty of whitespace on their maps.

There were 88 things as good as countries sending me readers in May. Here’s who they were:

Country	Readers
United States	2,997
India	142
Canada	137
Australia	120
Brazil	113
United Kingdom	113
Germany	106
Italy	69
Philippines	62
Finland	41
Norway	38
Spain	35
France	32
Mexico	32
Poland	28
Sweden	27
Romania	21
Bangladesh	19
Japan	19
Denmark	18
Argentina	15
Netherlands	14
South Africa	14
El Salvador	12
New Zealand	11
Peru	11
Thailand	10
European Union	9
Portugal	9
Hong Kong SAR China	8
Malaysia	8
Nigeria	8
Serbia	8
United Arab Emirates	7
Colombia	6
Croatia	6
Israel	6
Morocco	6
Belgium	5
Ireland	5
Jamaica	5
Kenya	5
Ukraine	5
Algeria	4
Greece	4
Indonesia	4
Puerto Rico	4
Saudi Arabia	4
Singapore	4
Austria	3
Dominican Republic	3
Ecuador	3
Georgia	3
Russia	3
Venezuela	3
Albania	2
American Samoa	2
Bahamas	2
Bulgaria	2
Chile	2
Costa Rica	2
Estonia	2
Hungary	2
Kuwait	2
Mali	2
Palestinian Territories	2
Seychelles	2
Slovenia	2
South Korea	2
Antigua & Barbuda	1
Armenia	1
Bolivia	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Egypt	1
French Polynesia	1 (*)
Guatemala	1
Honduras	1
Martinique	1
Oman	1
Pakistan	1
Slovakia	1
Sri Lanka	1 (*)
Switzerland	1
Taiwan	1
Tunisia	1
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1

I agree, that’s way more readers from Sweden and from Argentina than I would expect. Once again, I’m never going to turn away a reader, but I feel myself such a provincial interest I’m stunned I Have anything to say that could interest anyone in Bangladesh.

Pakistan and Sri Lanka were single-view countries in April 2023 too. I didn’t keep track of what single-view countries were in March. Sorry.

If you’d like to be a regular reader here, I’m sorry the last bit of my Twitter presence is gone. You can sign up to get posts delivered by e-mail, using the little box in the upper right corner that says ”Follow _Another Blog, Meanwhile_ via Email”. Or you can use the button above that to add this blog to your WordPress reader. You can use https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed in your RSS reader to get essays in a nice, organized fashion in your own reader, too. Please choose as fits your needs. I’ll be around a while yet.

Statistics April: Mostly, People See Me As A Source For Easter Egg Color News

I was tolerably well-liked, according to WordPress, back in April. A good chunk of that was Easter’s fault. I had a post several years ago explaining which Paas color tablet was which color. Paas helpfully makes all their tablets look about the same and has, or used to have, instructions to not put vinegar in one of them or else the egg will detonate. I used as a color reference Coke Zero cans, just in time for the Zero corporation to change their cans so it’s harder to tell the Zero from the Not-Zero cans. Life, you know?

But the big news is I got 5,357 page views in April, a slight increase from March. This total is actually below the twelve-month running mean leading up to April, though, which was 5,759.8 views per month. It’s also down a little from the twelve-month running median of 5,491.5. Unique visitors were a more happy number, if bigness is happiness. There were 3,091 visitors in April, above the running mean of 2,975.1 and running median of 2,905.

It’s hard not to feel like I could have just photocopied the last seven months’ worth of these reports.

Is that a sign of me being less liked this past month? No, but here’s two that are. I had 85 posts liked in April, well below the running mean of 141.3 and median of 137.5. And there were 56 comments over the month, below the mean of 73.3 and median of 80. This month, by the way, I resolved to answer comments within the day of my getting them, and I missed only (checks) 16 days. And this is somehow an improvement. Sociability is maybe not for me.

I mentioned the Paas tablet thing, which was by far the most popular post of mine in April. The most popular things I published in April, though, were:

• Wait, you can just pop Snuffy Smith’s head off like it was nothing?
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? Are tribesmen really going to conquer a prison? January – April 2023
• MiSTed: The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Chapter 23
• Statistics March: I have pictures again
• What’s Going On In Little Oop? Are they not in the Stone Age anymore?

I’m delighted that one of the MiSTing chapters finally cracked the top five. Meanwhile, my plan for the most popular of my projects is explaining what’s going on in …

• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (2 May)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (9 May)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (16 May)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (23 May)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (30 May)
• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (May I)

So this should be a popular month comic-strip-wise.

I get that everyone in Ukraine has better things to do than read my nonsense, and agree with them. I’m surprised more of the world doesn’t.

There were 89 countries or things as good as countries sending me readers. Here’s who they were:

Country	Readers
United States	4,115
India	172
Canada	132
Australia	88
United Kingdom	65
Brazil	63
Sweden	62
Spain	44
Italy	43
Germany	35
Japan	33
Mexico	33
Philippines	33
France	24
South Korea	22
Norway	21
New Zealand	20
Peru	17
Colombia	16
Netherlands	14
Finland	13
Switzerland	13
Indonesia	11
Saudi Arabia	11
European Union	10
Serbia	10
Singapore	10
Chile	9
Denmark	9
Hungary	9
Argentina	8
El Salvador	8
Malaysia	8
Austria	7
Czechia	7
Greece	7
Poland	7
South Africa	7
Belgium	6
Guatemala	6
Ireland	6
Kenya	6
Romania	6
Slovakia	6
Thailand	6
Turkey	6
Venezuela	5
Croatia	4
Israel	4
Nigeria	4
Portugal	4
United Arab Emirates	4
Costa Rica	3
Dominican Republic	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Pakistan	3
Russia	3
Slovenia	3
Taiwan	3
Yemen	3
Zimbabwe	3
Algeria	2
Bahamas	2
Bolivia	2
Ecuador	2
Estonia	2
Iraq	2
Mali	2
Malta	2
Morocco	2
Nicaragua	2
North Macedonia	2
Paraguay	2
Puerto Rico	2
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1
Barbados	1
French Polynesia	1
Ghana	1
Jamaica	1
Jersey	1
Kuwait	1
Mauritius	1
Nepal	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Panama	1
Sri Lanka	1
Togo	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1

And there may be fewer of these coming soon. WordPress announced they aren’t going to pay Elon Musk’s very funny idea of what it’s worth to post notices of articles on Twitter. So that, my last activity on Twitter, is gone … already? This week? As soon as someone at Twitter Headquarters remembers to turn it off? Who knows. Anyway the important thing is if you want to follow me regularly you need to do it by adding me to your WordPress reader, or to your RSS feed — https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed is its address — or sign up to get posts delivered by e-mail. Or occasionally wonder about Paas Easter egg tablet colors. Your choice.

In Which I Must Live With My Shame

I realized this weekend I completely failed to do any of the March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing that was such a great gimmick for me last year. I was looking forward to a month of nice, easy writing for months and then forgot I had an excuse to do it again. And now I’ve remembered when there isn’t even a molecule of March left in the year. And I can’t just start out with, like, an April Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing. That’s the wrong level of awkwardness in the name. But what can I do, send an appeal to the Commissioner of March for an exception?

Statistical Nibble: What Was Popular Here In January

I do keep meaning to do my usual review of the past month’s readership figures here. I also keep running into this problem where it’s suddenly ike midnight and I have to go to bed. So let me get a bit of it out and maybe we’ll finish up the rest of the pieces later.

Comic strip plot recaps are always the most popular thing I publish in any month. Here’s the five things published in January 2023 that got the most page views. See if you can see what they have in common:

• Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 31, 2022)
• What’s Going On In Eye Lie Popeye? Also, what is Eye Lie Popeye? October – December 2022
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Why do Alley Oop and Ooola have a daughter? October 2022 – January 2023
• Statistics December: I Give In And See How People Like Being Mad At Funky Winkerbean
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? Where did the Bandar cavalry come from? October 2022 – January 2023

That’s right: a couple of these got retweeted by the Son of Stuck Funky twitter panel on the side of the page. (My Twitter account is defunct, but it still posts announcements of my articles here, so far as I know.) With Funky Winkerbean ended, though, I am going to be in so much trouble if the story comics start including weekly recaps so my job is unnecessary. Still, the next-most-popular thing was chapter eight of The Tale of Grumpy Weasel. I’m glad to see that getting some traction. As I get deeper into the book I’m coming to more like the protagonist, even if Arthur Scott Bailey does not. He’s done such a good job at making Grumpy despicable that he’s falling over the other side to become adorable again.

My plans for story comics the next couple weeks — I haven’t decided whether to add Olive and Popeye to the rotation — is as follows:

• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (14 February)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (21 February)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (28 February)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (7 February II)
• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (14 February II)

And if that changes, I’ll know first, but you’ll know soon after. See you then.

In the Sequel They Join the Writer Doing a New Version of _Turnabout_

I don’t really have the time to go to Hollywood and pitch a script or write it up or anything so if someone could help me out how does this sound to them: movie where the person making a new version of 18 Again wakes up in the body of a person who’s making a new version of Vice-Versa? And so they both go and try to meet up and figure out how to undo this, but they find out that actually one of them is in the body of someone they didn’t know was working on making a new version of Freaky Friday? It’ll be something kind of but not exactly like something we’ve enjoyed enough before!

Statistics 2022: Everybody Likes Me Complaining About Comic Strips, Comic Strip Sites

With the old year pretty well finished off it’s also a good time to look back at the readership figures for it. And yes, I put up with having to go to a whole other web browser because WordPress broke a something.

WordPress tells me, finally, that there were 70,038 page views in 2022. That’s the largest number I’ve had in any single year, and is nearly 10,000 more than I had in 2021. The change alone is more page views than I had in all 2014, when I thought things were going pretty well. You probably thought that about 2014 too.

There were 36,714 unique visitors around here in 2022. That’s a slight growth from 2021’s count of 26,061. Not sure why so few. That’s the smallest increase in unique visitors since 2016, when my visitor count dropped compared to 2015. There were 1,790 likes given to things in 2022, barely up from 2021’s 1,768. Still, that’s my most-liked year since 2018, which I’ll take.

And I am amazed that the number of unique visitors is greater than the total number of page views I had in a year through to 2017, and pretty close to 2018. 2022 saw a rise to 1.91 views-per-visitor, my highest number since 2015.

And there were 718 comments given in 2022, again technically an increase from 2021, when there were 700. And similarly this was the greatest number of comments since 2018. So this thing where Garrison and I keep talking to each other instead of anything else is good for my feeling of accomplishment, at least.

As I’d said, people really like to see my complaining about comic strips. Or at least doing plot recaps. Take a look at the ten most popular things published in 2022 and see if you notice anything in common about them:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Is anything real happening in The Phantom? February – May 2022
• Sherman’s Lagoon is on GoComics now, not Comics Kingdom
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Who’s writing Gil Thorp now? April – July 2022
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Did Captain Savarna have kids with The Phantom? May – July 2022
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is Savarna trying to destroy The Phantom? December 2021 – February 2022
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why does everybody want Wilbur dead? October 2021 – January 2022
• Why Is Everyone Mad at _Funky Winkerbean_?
• Why I Am Angry at Funky Winkerbean, Yes, Again
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April angry the show she wanted made got made? November 2021 – February 2022
• Judge Parker and The Phantom look odd because Mike Manley isn’t drawing them

Going farther down the list of articles I find that while I may have written something that wasn’t related to Funky Winkerbean, I couldn’t prove it. When I got away from that, I was complaining about Comics Kingdom making the Sunday strips illegible, or that time GoComics blew up their own servers for a week and pretended nothing happened. (I still haven’t heard any reports on what went wrong back in early November there.) My most popular piece that wasn’t about comic strips was 60s Popeye: Ballet de Spinach, a cartoon without spinach in it. Why? It’s an okay enough cartoon and an okay enough review but what is the appeal there? Maybe people really want to see Popeye in a tutu and this is what they’ve got?

Anyway my most popular creative piece — and this is going down a long way, I swear — was MiSTed: Safety First (part 1 of 16). The other parts aren’t that much less popular, it’s just this is way down the list.

By far the closest I’ve ever gotten to capturing the whole Pan American Highway in one of these.

There were 153 countries or country-like things sending me page views in 2022. Here’s the roster. Yes, it includes Greenland, one of my big ambitions.

Country	Readers
United States	47,234
Finland	3,530
Australia	2,974
India	2,294
Canada	2,154
United Kingdom	1,907
Italy	908
Brazil	907
Germany	723
Philippines	621
Sweden	419
Spain	406
France	359
Japan	264
Norway	264
Nigeria	245
South Africa	226
Ireland	214
Singapore	188
Peru	165
Mexico	164
Denmark	159
Austria	143
Romania	142
Netherlands	141
Thailand	141
Bulgaria	132
El Salvador	125
Malaysia	125
Portugal	118
Serbia	113
New Zealand	102
Indonesia	95
Saudi Arabia	94
Czech Republic	84
Turkey	84
Belgium	83
Switzerland	83
Pakistan	81
Argentina	80
Colombia	78
Poland	76
Hungary	75
Russia	74
Kenya	72
Greece	66
Egypt	65
European Union	64
Taiwan	63
Chile	57
United Arab Emirates	56
South Korea	54
Vietnam	54
Hong Kong SAR China	47
Jamaica	47
Bahrain	44
Croatia	43
Ecuador	40
Israel	38
Costa Rica	30
Venezuela	30
Bangladesh	28
Sri Lanka	26
Iraq	24
Macedonia	24
Ukraine	22
Barbados	21
Kuwait	19
Puerto Rico	18
Trinidad & Tobago	17
Bosnia & Herzegovina	16
Slovenia	16
Guatemala	15
Cyprus	14
Estonia	14
Dominican Republic	13
Lebanon	12
Nepal	12
China	11
Lithuania	11
Slovakia	11
Albania	10
Mauritius	10
Jordan	9
Latvia	9
Uruguay	9
Azerbaijan	8
Montenegro	8
Tunisia	7
Bahamas	6
Honduras	6
Cambodia	5
Cameroon	5
Ethiopia	5
Luxembourg	5
Malta	5
Oman	5
Qatar	5
Uganda	5
Belarus	4
Bolivia	4
Kosovo	4
Mauritania	4
Mongolia	4
Morocco	4
Namibia	4
Papua New Guinea	4
Suriname	4
U.S. Virgin Islands	4
American Samoa	3
Armenia	3
Kazakhstan	3
Malawi	3
Panama	3
Algeria	2
Anguilla	2
Fiji	2
Georgia	2
Ghana	2
Guadeloupe	2
Guam	2
Isle of Man	2
Libya	2
Palestinian Territories	2
Uzbekistan	2
Antigua & Barbuda	1
Belize	1
Brunei	1
Congo – Brazzaville	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Cook Islands	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
Cuba	1
Curaçao	1
Gambia	1
Gibraltar	1
Greenland	1
Guinea	1
Guyana	1
Iceland	1
Lesotho	1
Liechtenstein	1
Macau SAR China	1
Madagascar	1
Maldives	1
Mozambique	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Paraguay	1
Somalia	1
St. Lucia	1
Unknown Region	1
Yemen	1
Zimbabwe	1

Not to get all giddy about my own numbers, but the 47,234 visitors from the United States is grater than the total number of page views through to 2019. This really shows what talking so much about comic strips will do for me. And my but I’d like to know more about that ‘Unknown Region’.

WordPress tells me I published 209,826 words in 2022, for a words-per-posting average of 575. This is a pretty big drop from 2021, probably because I’m posting shorter segments of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction. There were an average of 4.6 likes per posting, and an average of 2.4 comments per posting, although a lot of posts didn’t get any comment at all because there’s only so much I can say about being mad at Funky Winkerbean.

So thanks for looking around as I look over myself and agree, I write a lot about Funky Winkerbean.

Statistics December: I Give In And See How People Like Being Mad At Funky Winkerbean

WordPress’s statistics page is still broken for Safari. But curiosity finally got the better of me and I used Firefox to look at what December’s, and for that matter 2022’s, statistics looked like. So let’s take a quick peek at that, shall we?

So what I saw in December was a suspiciously even 6,000 page views. That’s my third-highest total in the past twelve months, beating the running mean of 5,710.8 and running median of 5,395 views. These came from 2,957 unique visitors, below the running mean of 3,026.8 but above the median of 2,931. Altogether I got 142 comments which is down a little from the running mean of 151.3 and median of 148.5. And there were 89 comments, way above the running mean of 56.7 and median of 51.5.

You know, if a long-running comic strip could end every month it’d do wonders for my circulation, but it would also make me sadder. Maybe I should start giving updates on The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day.

Driving all this, of course, is that people are mad. And what are they mad at? Comic strips. And one comic strip more than any other. Here’s the roster of the five most popular things that I published in December:

• Why Is Everyone Mad at _Funky Winkerbean_?
• Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 18, 2022)
• Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 11, 2022)
• Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 25, 2022)
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Are there even stories anymore in Gil Thorp? September – December 2022

My most popular piece that wasn’t about comic strips was Statistics Saturday: Adaptations Of _A Christmas Carol_ Ranked and I’m glad that’s got some love. Some of these versions are quite good.

Talking about the comic strips is sure to stay my biggest feature. So here’s my plan for what story strips to discuss in the coming weeks. There’s no extra Popeye comics that I’m aware of, here.

• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (10 January)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (17 January)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (24 January)
• Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (31 January)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (38 January)

You may think this map is worse, since it squeezes the countries of the world into a smaller space while filling up with white space that conveys no information at all. So it is. But understand the trade-off: someone got paid to make this report worse.

There were 86 countries sending me any readers at all in December. Here they are:

Country	Readers
United States	4,391
Australia	247
Canada	185
India	133
United Kingdom	132
Italy	114
Brazil	86
Philippines	54
Peru	47
Spain	44
Germany	39
France	31
Finland	29
Sweden	27
South Africa	25
Japan	24
Norway	22
Ireland	19
European Union	18
Malaysia	18
Mexico	17
Switzerland	17
Romania	15
Pakistan	13
Sri Lanka	13
Austria	11
Denmark	11
Netherlands	11
Thailand	11
Turkey	11
Chile	10
United Arab Emirates	10
Taiwan	9
Czech Republic	8
Indonesia	8
South Korea	8
Croatia	7
Nigeria	7
New Zealand	6
Venezuela	6
Barbados	5
Dominican Republic	5
Hungary	5
Puerto Rico	5
Saudi Arabia	5
Singapore	5
Greece	4
Poland	4
Russia	4
Belgium	3
China	3
El Salvador	3
Estonia	3
Kuwait	3
Portugal	3
Slovenia	3
Argentina	2
Armenia	2
Bangladesh	2
Bolivia	2
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Bulgaria	2
Jamaica	2
Kenya	2
Latvia	2
Lithuania	2
Malta	2
Serbia	2
Vietnam	2
Albania	1
Algeria	1
Cameroon	1
Colombia	1
Costa Rica	1
Ecuador	1
Fiji	1
Guatemala	1
Hong Kong SAR China	1
Isle of Man	1
Israel	1
Luxembourg	1
Macedonia	1
Maldives	1
Montenegro	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Ukraine	1

I don’t know who’s on a one-reader streak. Not worth digging out. Nice to see the Isle of Man make an appearance, though.

WordPrees tells me that as of the start of 2023, I’ve had 338,223 views from 190,278 unique visitors, made 3,621 posts, and gotten 5,633 comments altogether. And that in December I posted 19,010 words, one of my more verbose months in the year. Must be all that Grumpy Weasel talk. My words-per-post jumped up to 613.2 for the month, and for the year climbed to 575. We’ll just see whether I stay this talkative in the month to come.

Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 31, 2022)

What can you say about a 50-year-old comic strip that died? That it loved the Barry Allen Flash and the mythical Marvel Bullpen? That it was full of names that were not exactly jokes but were odd without hitting that Paul Rhymer-esque mellifluous absurdity? That it spent the last ten years with no idea how to pace its plot developments? Yes, it was all that, but more, it got a lot of people mad at it.

This is not to say that Funky Winkerbean was a bad strip. Outright bad strips aren’t any fun to snark on. You have to get something that’s good enough to read on its own, but that’s also trying very hard to be something it’s faceplanting at. So let me start by saying there’s a lot that was good about Tom Batiuk’s work. The strip started as a goofball slice-of-life schooltime wackiness strip. It would’ve fit in with the web comics of the late 90s or early 2000s. It transitioned into a story-driven, loose continuity strip with remarkable ease. And it tried to be significant. That it fell short of ambitions made it fun to gather with other people and snark about, and to get mad about. Still, credit to Tom Batiuk for having ambition and acting on it. It allowed us to have a lot of fun for decades.

Enough apologia; now, what’s going on and why is everyone angry about it? Last week’s get-together of the whole Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft gang at St Spires was the last we’ve seen of our cast. Monday started in some vaguely Jetsonian future drawn by comic book celebrity John Byrne. (Byrne has drawn for Funky Winkerbean in the past, most notably for several months while Tom Batiuk recovered from foot surgery. I think Byrne also helped redesign the characters to their modern level of photorealism. I may have that credit wrong.)

Tom Batiuk and John Byrne’s Funky Winkerbean for the 27th of December, 2022. I’m not sure whether Future Lisa and Future Mom are supposed to be hovering, in the second panel there, or whether it’s just the shadows distracting me. Also, while it is terrible to have a time you might describe as ‘Burnings’, if all it does is reduce the number of the antiquarian bookstores … I mean, I hate to admit it but that’s getting off pretty well.

This epilogue week stars Future Lisa, granddaughter of Summer Moore and great-granddaughter of Les and Lisa Moore. For a birthday treat Future Lisa’s mother takes her by Future Car to “the outskirts”, that is to say, Crankshaft. Future Car has the design of that spaceship toy made from the gun that murdered My Father John Darling. They’re there to go to an antiquarian bookstore, “one of the last to survive the burnings”. The term suggests a dystopia before a utopia, which is a common enough pattern in science fiction stories.

The bookstore is the little hobby business of Lillian Probably-Has-A-Last-Name, from Crankshaft. The old-in-our-time Lillian isn’t there, but a pretty nice-looking robot with a lot of wheels is. Since the bookstore is only (apparently) accessible by stairs I’m not sure how the robot gets in there. I guess if it only has to be delivered here once it can be badly designed for stairs. I had assumed the bookstore was desolate, since the sign for it was hanging on only a single hook. I forgot one of the basic rules for Tom Batiuk universes, though, which is that signs are never hung straight. This sounds like snark but I’m serious. Signs are always hung or, better, taped up a little off-level.

Future Mom’s brought her daughter there to get a “tree copy” of Summer Moore’s Westview, the book that made the future swell. We saw her starting to do interviews for it when time Agent Harley, whom the Son of Stuck Funky folks aptly named TimeMop, shared a dream-or-was-it.

Tom Batiuk and John Byrne’s Funky Winkerbean for the 29th of December, 2022. I would have thought Future Lisa’s meant to be old enough for it to be odd she’d be surprised to see something with her name on it, at least when the name is a common enough one like ‘Lisa’. A friend pointed out if Future Lisa had chosen her name, for example as a result of a transition, then this would be an authentic reaction. Tom Batiuk already did a transgender character a couple months ago, but, what the heck, why not take that interpretation? If Tom Batiuk had an opinion he could have said otherwise.

Future Lisa sees beside Summer’s sociological text other books on the same shelf. Fallen Star, Les Moore’s first book, a true-crime book of how he solved the murder of My Father John Darling. Strike Four, which I mistook for Jim Bouton’s baseball memoir. Strike Four is in fact a collection of Crankshaft strips about the title character’s baseball career. Elemental Force, the anti-climate-change superhero book published by Westview-area publisher Atomik Comix. And Lisa’s Story, Les Moore’s memoir about how his wife chose to die rather than take the medical care that might extend her life with Les. Future Lisa can’t help but ask: what are a sociological study, a true-crime book, a baseball comic, a superhero comic, and a dead-wife memoir doing sharing a shelf? Does this bookstore have any organizational scheme whatsoever? (And yes, of course: these are all books by local authors. Except for Strike Four, which shouldn’t exist as we know it in-universe.)

So they get both Westview and Lisa’s Story. The last Funky Winkerbean is Future Mom telling Future Lisa it’s bedtime. Stop reading Lisa’s Story because it’s bedtime, and “the books will still be there tomorrow”. As many have snarked, this does read as Tom Batiuk making the last week of his strip yet another advertisement for the story about how Lisa Moore died. This differs from most of the post-2007 era of the comic strip by happening later than it. For those with kinder intentions, you can read this more as a statement of how, even though the strip is done, everything about it remains. It can be reread and we hope enjoyed as long as you want. And that it’s appropriate for Lisa’s Story to stand in for this as it is the central event defining so much of the comic’s run.

Tom Batiuk and John Byrne’s Funky Winkerbean for the 31st of December, 2022. I am sincerely happy to see a future with that ‘knobbly, curvey architecture and furniture’ style. It’s a very 1970s Future style that I enjoy. It also evokes the era of comic books from when Funky Winkerbean debuted, so it has this nice extra bit of period-appropriateness.

And with this, you are as caught-up on Funky Winkerbean as it is possible or at least wise to be. I can’t say what comic strip you will go on to be mad about. It feels like nothing will ever be that wonderfully maddening again. No, it will not be 9 Chickweed Lane; that’s too infuriating to be any fun getting mad reading. But there’ll be something. We thought comic strip snarking would never recover from the collapse of For Better Or For Worse, and maybe it hasn’t been that grand again, but Funky Winkerbean was a lot of fun for a good long while.

Statistics 2022: Jokes I Thought Of After That I Wished I Included

1. For Some Bad Wordle Starts: one of them should absolutely have been “four greens, one yellow”.

Yeah, that’s about it. Sorry. It was a real Funky Winkerbean of a year for me and it hasn’t been good for my esprit de l’escalier. Maybe next year.

Reference: The Basque History of the World, Mark Kurlansky.

Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 25, 2022)

I’m not sure everyone is mad at Funky Winkerbean in its penultimate week. Annoyed, perhaps. Irritated. But mad takes a special level of broken trust between audience and creator. Annoyance or impatience is more appropriate when we-the-audience see where this is going and the story won’t get there.

Last week everyone was mad because we’d learned a time-travelling janitor manipulated minds for decades so Summer Moore could start to write a world-healing book. But it was all a dream. Then she wandered around an empty town looking at places she didn’t have any emotional connection to. Then, last Sunday, we switched to Harry Dinkle worried that the incoming blizzard might spoil the church choir concert at St Spires, his side gig. They’re doing “Claude Barlow’s Jazz Messiah”.

This week showed, in both Funky Winkerbean and its spinoff strip Crankshaft, all the big characters braving a massive storm to get to the concert. Like, everybody. Summer Moore hitchhikes her way onto the bus from the Bedside Manor Senior Living Home. (The implication is she’s spent the whole day moping and looking at, like, the instant-photo-print-shop her dad’s high school chem lab partner worked at while home from college and thinking how in the end we are all unfocused Polaroids, and now she wants to go see Harry Dinkle’s church choir sing.) The whole staff of Montoni’s. Les Moore and his wife, Not-Lisa, and Not-Lisa’s daughter from her first marriage Not-Summer. Everyone.

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 21st of December, 2022. So, uh, apparently they raised enough cash at Montoni’s going-out-of-business sale to get new snow tires? Or was Montoni’s Closing all part of Summer’s dream? But she thought her “dream” might have been overwork from doing interview for her book, that she only announced she was going to try doing when she heard Montoni’s was closing?

So everyone, I trust, gets the reason Tom Batiuk wants this. He’s getting the whole cast of both his strips together so they can bask in one another’s presence one last time. What has gone unexplained, to everyone’s mild annoyance, is the lack of any idea why it’s so important everyone get there. Especially since the church is set in Centerview, the town Crankshaft takes place in. The Funky Winkerbean folks live in Westview, nearby but still, a bit of a drive.

Especially in the face of a storm that we were told could drop a record amount of snow. It’s the church choir doing a concert that you’d think would have been postponed or cancelled for the weather anyway. It’s not, like, John and George coming back from the dead to play with Paul and Ringo one last time.

It makes sense for Harry Dinkle to carry on despite the weather; that’s almost his defining joke. And to rope his choir into that, yeah, that’s necessary for his joke. Roping the Bedside Manor senior band, that’s his other side gig, in to providing music? Yeah, sure. But once you’re past Sgt Pepper’s Sad and Lonely Hearts Club Band? Nobody else has a reason to be there. The Time Janitor stuff somehow easier to buy, an application of that Father Brown line about Gladstone and the ghost of Parnell. The only person who wants them there is Tom Batiuk, looking to have the whole cast under one roof for the last time, and he gets his way.

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 25th of December, 2022. Once again the Son of Stuck Funky folks do a heroic job: they’ve figured the most likely identities of all 69 characters in this panel. And tagged which ones are Crankshaft characters so it’s okay if you don’t recognize them from hate-reading Funky Winkerbean.

It would be touching if it didn’t look like the populations of two towns decided to get stuck in a single church’s parking lot.

Incidentally on the 24th, Ed Crankshaft saw the Funky cast and said “seems like there’s a lot of new folks here tonight! Hope they’re not all planning to move into the neighborhood!”. It’s a cute way to acknowledge the Funky gang will likely still make appearances in Crankshaft. It would also be a good tip to Funky readers who haven’t heard that they might want to pick up Crankshaft.

It reminds me of when Darrin Bell put the comic strip Rudy Park into reruns. Bell had a natural disaster strike that strip and evacuate all the residents to nearby Candorville, his other — and still going — comic strip. Catch here is I don’t believe Crankshaft’s name has been spoken in Funky for, like, thirty years. It started as a cute and even realistic affectation. Characters remembered there had been a cranky old bus driver who said a bunch of funny malapropisms, but not his name. It’s a bit of a disadvantage trying to point readers to your other project, though. Even Ronald-Ann spent a week shoving the name Outland into Opus’s ears before Bloom County ended the first time. Maybe that’s this coming, final, week in Funky Winkerbean. We’ll see, and we’ll see how mad that gets us all.

Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 18, 2022)

Because it was all a dream.

Or was it?

So yeah, that whole bonkers storyline where the janitor was a Time Agent making sure Summer Moore writes a history of Funkytown? It transpired on Monday this was all a dream, or was it. Which, yes, does address everything I was mad about in the storyline last time. Right down to how we were informed Summer had worked out the specialness of Harley The Janitor. And that her first and only book would be the most important book, like, ever.

Awakened, Summer decides to go for a walk to clear her head. This takes her on a silent walk through Westview, ending at a closed city pool’s old diving board. From atop the ladder she thinks of how “it doesn’t always have to be rise and decline … we have the agency to flip the script and write a different ending”. It’s a sequence that TFHackett, at Son of Stuck Funky, noticed echoed a story a couple years ago. Funky Winkerbean himself wandered around the place and moped about how your hopes and plans and dreams all get washed away. I understand where Funky, or Summer, might want to do something like this. Everybody needs to spend some time walking around feeling sad. Thing that annoyed me is the Funky Winkerbean characters don’t have emotions besides sadness, so the potency of a good mope is lost.

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 12th of December, 2022. Well, I didn’t see it coming. Not sure if it’s better making the Time Janitor the dream or the reality.

The idea of closing out the comic strip with farewell visits to all the key places? Good, solid one. Here’s why I’m mad anyway. Summer Moore has not been a character, in the strip, in a decade. She’s appeared a couple times, but she hasn’t got a perspective. I think this past month is the first time we even learned for sure that she was still in college. So her looking at a place doesn’t carry any weight; it’s on us the reader to have a reaction.

This can be fine, if the locations have meaning to the audience. Two of the locations she visited might: the house of band director Harry Dinkle and past Westview High School. Summer wasn’t in band; she played sports so while she knew the band was there she also didn’t care. And while she went to Westview I can’t think of any time she ever reflected on her high school experience. That’s all right; the readers know those spots well enough.

And then we get to the bonkers places to showcase. She visits the house where Summer’s half-brother’s adoptive parents lived when they first got married. Or to speak more efficiently, it’s a house she could not care about. The spot was, as Son of Stuck Funky discovered, shown to readers ten years ago. But who could remember that? And then at her half-brother’s adoptive parents’ second apartment. Comic Book Harriet found these places are versions of Tom Batiuk and his wife’s old apartments. So they make sense as places to fit into the backgrounds somewhere, but good grief. Another spot was a troubled-youth home where Crazy Harry lived for a couple years as a teen. Or, to connect it to Summer, a place where her father’s high school friend who works in a comic book shop now lived as a teen. Again, this can work, if the readers have some reason to connect with it. Summer can’t provide that, and I will wrestle any reader who has feelings about where Crazy Harry lived as a teen.

Thing is the comic strip has got places that would connect to the readers. The high school. Montoni’s Pizzeria, closed last month in a sequence so abrupt it hardly seemed real. The comic book shop. The town park and the gazebo where everything in the world has to visit. Les and his current wife Not-Lisa’s porch swing. Why waste one of the three remaining weeks on things that can’t communicate?

The diving board where Summer makes her observation is getting to where it should be. A diving board has obvious meaning, as a place to ponder frightening transition. And it has a purpose in the comic strip. One running gag in the first decades of the strip was teenage Les Moore failing to find the courage to jump off it. That this is picked well makes the badness of the earlier locations stand out.

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 17th of December, 2022. Eh, not to be all hipster but I liked John Cheever’s original story better.

And then this Sunday’s strip seems to promise nonsense. It’s Harry Dinkle organizing a church concert and worrying about the weather. This seems so detached from the narrative that … well, there’s gossip about whether Tom Batiuk chose to end the strip or was forced to. There’s always gossip like that whenever a strip ends or changes hands. I’m inclined to think it was Batiuk’s free choice. Ending the comic at the end of its current contract, after it had reached fifty years? That seems fair. And a lot of storylines the last couple years have had an elegiac tone. I mean even more than usual for a comic strip so concerned with how everything is getting worse.

The announcement the strip was ending feels like it came late, about six weeks before the end of publication. But, like, Gary Larson announced he was ending The Far Side only about ten weeks before it closed. Charles Schulz gave only about two weeks’ notice, and he was forced to stop Peanuts for failing health. The syndicate would have given him a dump truck full of money to continue or hire a replacement, but he already had more dump trucks full of money than they did. Bill Watterson’s year-long notice that Calvin and Hobbes was ending was an outlier. Norm Feuti announced the ending of Retail about a month before the strip shut down, again after a bunch of stories suggesting an end to things. I forget how freely Feuti chose to leave Retail behind in favor of writing children’s books. Anyway, my point is the public notice doesn’t seem out of line with other strips that chose to end.

But jumping from Summer Moore atop the diving board to a Harry Dinkle story? That seems like a strip running as the normal routine Christmastime action. And therefore a piece for the “oooh, the syndicate and Tom Batiuk are fighting and that’s why the strip is ending” hypothesis. On the other hand, let me be charitable, and set up to reveal myself a fool. This could be a setup that would logically gather the whole cast together and give them a chance to say farewell things. The pacing of this seems awful — why waste weeks on a Dream Or Was It — but it’s been a while wince Funky Winkerbean drew praise for its story pacing. I give up trying to guess where the story is going, or what behind-the-scenes drama might have happened. I’m just going to share what people are mad about.

Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 11, 2022)

I don’t figure to publish nothing but Funky Winkerbean updates until the strip ends later this month. But why not keep people up to date on the strip’s turn to bonkers? Only in an inferior way to the Son of Stuck Funky blog, which has a depth of knowledge and a community that can’t be matched by me? Still, there’s people who’d like a brief recap of what’s going on and that’s what I can serve.

Last time everyone was mad at Funky Winkerbean we’d learned the school janitor was a time traveller there to make sure Summer Moore wrote her book. Since then Time Janitor Harley Davidson has been explaining how he used his super-powers of nudging people’s minds. This all with the mission to make sure Summer Moore gets born. This brought up a sequence of snapshots of the Relationship of Les and Lisa, told in such brevity as to become cryptic.

For example. Last Sunday Harley explained how “when Susan Smith’s actions threatened the possibility of your parents getting back together before they were married … ” he gave “a gentle push to an already guilty conscience”. We see, in the recap, Les Moore consoling Susan Smith, who’s in the hospital. The reader who doesn’t remember the mid-90s well can understand there was a suicide attempt, but not how this fit together. So.

Story from the mid-90s. Susan Smith, one of Les Moore’s students, has a crush on him somehow. And she’s mistaking routine, supportive comments from her teacher as signals that he’s interested too. This was deftly done, at the time. Like, you could see where Smith got the wrong idea, and where Moore had no reason to think he was giving her signals. And was all funny in that I’m-glad-I’m-not-in-this-imminent-disaster way.

This turned to disaster when Smith learned that Moore did not, in fact, have any interest in her. And, particularly, had a girlfriend, Lisa, who was tromping around Europe for the summer. Most particularly when Les asked Smith to mail out the audio tape he was sending Lisa, with his wedding proposal to her. She destroyed the tape, and tried to destroy herself. The thing that Smith confessed was that she had destroyed the tape and that’s why Lisa wasn’t answering the proposal.

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 4th of December, 2022. Boy, has to be a heck of a thing if Les never told Summer about what role a student’s suicide attempt had in her parents’ courtship, right? Still not answered: why Harley stuck around as janitor at Westview when Summer was off at Kent State for a decade. Oh, and there was a strange energy talking about this story on Usenet, as it first unfolded in the 90s, when a woman named Susan Smith became scandalously famous for drowning her children. (That’s the sort of scandal that got nationwide attention in the 90s.) It had nothing to do with the strip, naturally, but it made rec.arts.comics.strips discussion of the character weirder.

The revelation set Les off to Europe to chase Lisa down, incidentally the first time I ragequit Funky Winkerbean. The thing he kept missing her, getting to tourist sites ever closer to when she left, down to where he was missing her by seconds and the story wasn’t over yet. Anyway, he finally caught up to her in Elea, Greece, at Zeno’s world-famous escape room (it’s a tunnel one stadia long, empty apart from a tortoise and an arrow at the midpoint). As you’d think, Summer Moore got born and all.

I don’t remember, why Les couldn’t send another tape, or a letter, or call like a normal human being might. But I do remember that “intercepted proposal” is a story Tom Batiuk would use again, in Crankshaft. There, Lillian, who I bet has a last name, revealed to her comatose sister Lucy that she was why Lucy’s Eugene stopped writing while deployed overseas. Eugene wrote a proposal letter and promised if Lucy didn’t reply he’d stop trying to communicate with her. Jealous, Lillian hid the letter, and so her sister never married. The story premise might not work for you but it seems there’s something that appeals to Batiuk in it. Also now you understand why Lillian — who’s become a little old lady writing cozy mysteries about bookstore-related murders while running a tiny used bookshop herself — draws hatred from a streak of Crankshaft readers.

Other miscellaneous stuff. There’s a reference to the post office bombing storyline, a 1996 story detailed well on Son Of Stuck Funky for people who want the details. (The story was a loose take on the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building by white supremacists.) Harley revealed it was his mental influence that got the band and the football team to donate blood. We should have seen that coming. Why would community leaders come together in a crisis like that of their own free will?

Finally Summer asks whether Harley’s ever ‘nudged’ her mind, a question that can only be believed if answered ‘yes’. Harley says ‘no’ and unloads a double- and then a triple-decker word zeppelin. Its goal: to explain how Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean both happened in the present but were ten years out of synch with one another. Immediately after Lisa Moore’s death Funky Winkerbean jumped ahead ten years. This allowed Tom Batiuk to skip the sadness of Les Moore getting over Lisa’s death and jump right into the sadness of Les Moore’s inability to get over Lisa’s death. But there was no reason for Crankshaft to jump like that. So, for a long while, when Crankshaft characters appeared in Funky Winkerbean they were a decade older and vice-versa.

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 7th of December, 2022. There has long been a rumor in the comics snark community that the strips are drawn a year or more ahead of time, but the word balloons and final script not filled in until shortly before publication. (To my knowledge neither Batiuk nor Ayers have confirmed this, but I’m willing to begrudge people who can corect me.) This may sound daft, but it’s not very different from the “Marvel Method” used to produce comics in the 1960s with, generally, better integration of art and story. If true, though, it would explain things like why the word balloons here so badly match the natural pauses in Harley’s speech here. Speech balloon placement is very hard, but look at how awful a set of sentences that is in the second panel, and how badly it fits that grand staircase of word balloons.

Not to brag, but I followed this and even why Tom Batiuk would do that. It’s a riff on DC Comics’s old Earth-1 and Earth-2 and so on worlds. Earth-1 was roughly the Silver Age superheroes, and Earth-2 their 20-year-older Golden Age forebears. Some characters, particularly Superman, appeared in both and so were older or younger when out of their home universe. But it was also confusing to anyone whose brain isn’t eaten up with this nonsense and is why I don’t brag about my brain. And so three percent of the last month of Funky Winkerbean was spent explaining why now Crankshaft won’t be out of synch with it anymore.

A problem endemic to stories about time travellers meddling with history is character autonomy. Add to that Harley’s claimed power to nudge people’s choices — including, we learn, getting Lisa to move back to Westview, and getting Crazy Harry a job with the comic book shop so he wouldn’t move out of town — and Summer has good reason to wonder about her parents. Harley owns up to changing Les and Lisa’s schedules to have the same lunch period. And to set it so nobody else would sit near them. But no, he says, Lisa chose of her own free will to go talk to the only person she could.

Comics Book Harriet, at Son Of Stuck Funky, has an outstanding deep-dive into Les and Lisa’s high school relationship, as it developed in the 1980s. It’s (of course) not this relationship of destiny, but a much more ambiguous and generally funny thing. The element I had completely forgotten is that Lisa started out as a terrible girlfriend. The comic logic is correct: you can preserve Les’s role as a loser if his girlfriend’s a terror. (It does play a bit into a misogynist idea of The Women They Be Crazy Harridans. But when you look at the full cast, with characters like Cindy Summers the Popular But Shallow Girl and Holly Budd the Hot Majorette … uh … well, sometimes you have to go with the cast types that give you scenarios.)

Anyway with that complete lack of reassurance Harley … explains how he got his name? And this was what confirmed I’d need to do another “why is everybody mad at Funky Winkerbean” essay. Because we’re told that when he arrived in Sometime In The Past Westview he needed to establish an identity. He saw a guy on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and figured, yeah that. I’m not faulting him for choosing a goofy name. He needs to blend in with a community where people have names like “Funky Winkerbean”, “Les Moore”, “Holly Budd”, “Jack Stropp”, “Bob Andray” (cute!) (strip of July 18, 1976), “Mason Jarr”, “Chester Hagglemore”, “Cliff Anger”, and so on. He doesn’t know where to find a level. (I made a version of this crack on Son of Stuck Funky and folks asked why I didn’t list “Harry L Dinkle” among the names. And I don’t know; it just doesn’t strike me as the same sort of goofy as, oh, “Rocky Rhodes” or “Ferris Wheeler” do.) My issue is: he didn’t work that out before leaving his home time? He has a time machine and he couldn’t spend an extra day thinking out his cover? The only way I can see that making sense is if Harley had to leap into the past before he was ready. Since we haven’t seen anyone trying to stop him, this implies some Quantum Leap scenario, where Harley is moving uncontrolled from event to event, forever hoping his next expository lump will be the lump drone.

Oh also, today (the 11th) we learn Summer Moore’s not-yet-written transcendentally important book will also be her only book. As if anyone could live up to that standard. Also that Harley hasn’t messed up the book by telling her this. Why? Because she somehow “figured out” all of this on her own, without sharing any of it with the reader. Good grief.

It is technically too soon to say whether everyone will be mad at Funky Winkerbean next week. [ Added after seeing Monday’s strip: Yes, everyone already is and will still be. ] However, Epicus Doomus promises in a Son of Stuck Funky comment that “this thing is about to take the stupidest possible turn you can imagine” while staying “staggeringly boring too”. I, too, am curious.