Thanks to Rob S. for this next Batch Rejection and the Tom Falco:
Comics Kingdom released its new site on Wednesday, and at first nothing was working there. But when we finally did get to see some comics, the first one was this very good Macanudo!
Usual John provides this one, which definitely earns an extra “Eww”
Comics I Don't Understand 
Yes, the “Macanudo” is a good ‘un.
The last one reminds me of a joke my dad used to tell. A pretty woman sat on a painted toilet seat and got stuck. Paramedics tried to free her but couldn’t, so they detached the seat and brought her to the hospital. The doctor walks into the treatment room where the woman is lying on her stomach. The paramedic says, “Doc, what do you think?” The doctor responds, “It’s nice, but I don’t think you needed to frame it.”
Technically the “eyes” of a potato are the vegetative reproductive parts of the potato.
“Oh baby, your eyes are so beautiful” is different in the Potato head universe.
Every time Comics Kingdom “upgrades” there are issues. This time, they skipped ahead several weeks on at least one vintage strip (Buzz Sawyer). The older parts of the story were available in the archive, luckily. (The archive navigation seems improved.)
I suspect Comics Kingdom and GoComics don’t have much professional IT staff, and hire cartoonists part-time who know a little bit about website development, as a way of providing them some extra income. But I have no evidence of this.
@Raymond, yes I think that is part of what makes this cartoon rather creepy!
I rejected the Potato Head universe the day they removed REAL potatoes from the equation and substituted fake plastic potato like bodies.
“Child safety” my sweet patootie…
Comics Kingdom must have had government assistance. It takes a special touch to take a bad interface and make it worse. I looked at the implementations by the Toronto Star and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer but couldn’t decide which was worse.
zbicyclist, I’d like to believe it was something as benign as hiring amateurs. After over four decades in the software business, I’m more willing to believe that they use a highly rated, high-priced web design firm. Things really are entirely that bad — https://xkcd.com/2347/ only begins to scratch the surface.
I know from contacting them that GoComics has a small staff. I frequently see comments blaming them for a number of problems, like bad coloring, too small of images, reruns out of sync with the calendar, etc. They’ve told me that they do nothing with strips except take the image the content provider sends and stick it in the framework.
One thing I did notice today is that the side panel is back for Sally Forth. In a previous incarnation of the CK site, you would have to click the image and get an expanded version to see it. Then it was just gone for a time.
“they do nothing with strips except take the image the content provider sends and stick it in the framework”
Well there’s yer problem, Vern — they’re blindly taking input: when it changes, even slightly, it breaks things. This is a chronic problem with systems that interoperate without clear API contracts. “Not our fault” doesn’t quite cut it for me.
I’m sure I’ve following. What’s broken on GoComics?
“I’m sure I’ve following.”
I’m NOT sure I’m following. Sheesh.
I agree with pretty much everything Brian has said (both here and elsewhere) about GoComics and their technical (not to mention contractual) limitations regarding the material they present. It’s not just that they do not have the staff to modify or correct the images sent by the syndicates, they almost certainly (in most cases) do not have the rights to fiddle with anything that carries a third-party copyright.
To GC’s credit, when I reported a minor, but very annoying error in the internal title of a new comic (the GC technicians had accidentally appended a space to the “directory” name of “Wannabe”, by Luca Debus), GoComics fixed the mistake in just 90 minutes, which was a big surprise. (Currently, the URL works both with and without the space, before the fix, the space was mandatory.) So there is hope. Now if they would just get rid of that inane “featured comment” garbage…
GoComics is owned by Andrews McMeel, formerly Universal Press Syndicate. You would think that they could at least get their own comics working properly.
Same with Comics Kingdom, of course, which is owned by King Features.
GoComics charges about a third of what CK now wants, and their service is much more dependable and usable.
Both seem to think that cluttering my email inbox would be a Good Thing™, worth paying for, but I like opening one page in GC rather than having to find the comics among all the stuff in my inbox.
Yet another woman-glued-to-the-toilet-seat joke. They had just redone the bathroom with a Western motif, horseshoes, lariat, cowboy hat hanging on a peg on the wall. She’s stuck. He calls the fire department. She says “Give me something to cover myself!” He takes down the cowboy hat and puts it on her lap.
Firemen come and look at the situation. “We can save your wife but that little cowboy’s a goner.”
“GoComics is owned by Andrews McMeel, formerly Universal Press Syndicate. You would think that they could at least get their own comics working properly.”
You have the reason right there. They are owned by the syndicate. They don’t own the syndicate. Some other group determines the content. The GC staff’s job it to put it into the web site. And I’m unaware of any comics that don’t work properly due to anything they do.
Rob W – Sounds like a joke my dad would have told (but I don’t think he did – at least not to me).
@ Meryl (18) – Barney and Clyde has recently run three or four “Dad” jokes, topping each one with an improved “Grandpa Joke” (and crediting the original author in the gutter between the third and fourth panels):
P.S. The “Grandpa Jokes” were taken from Week 56 of the Invitational.
Kilby – Yes, those kinds of jokes. Plus his being an accountant with a wife who went to college for same –
The old gentleman had been an accountant for many decades. His employees noticed that every morning when he came in he would open his desk drawer, look in, and then start working. Eventually the gentlemen died. The first day back at work after his funeral the employees opened the drawer to find out what meant so mention to him that he had to look at first thing every day before starting to work.
The paper said “The debit is the left side and the credit is the right side.”
(For those who are not accountants or do not otherwise know what this means - Accounting entries each have a debit and credit and the net amount of same in any entry on the books has to be zero . Debits to an asset or expense account will increase them, while a credit will decrease them (for example – deposit to a bank account is a debit to the bank account on the books, while a check written on that bank account is a credit and will decrease it). With liabilities, capital and income the opposite is true. – If more info is needed, let me know, I have lived with this idea since I was maybe 10 or 12 and started helping my dad so it makes sense to me.)
So, this is the sort of thing that any accountant of any length of time should just know.