If it is the “same” price, why is she charging him “extra“, and just whose blood she is talking about?
For comparision, here is the Spanish version:
P.S. I hope everyone enjoys the Spanish version, because the new, moronic Comics Kingdom website made it excessively difficult to find.
Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s the same price to sharpen the blade, but there is an extra charge to clean the handle.
I suppose that, in the world of Macanudo, it makes sense for Death to go to a witch for scythe sharpening and cleaning, but I wouldn’t think she would get much business for regular sharpening.
+1. The sharpening of Death’s scythe is the same price as for an agricultural worker’s. But there’s also a charge for cleaning blood from the shaft.
And since we all know how fruitful it is to analyse cartoons, isn’t Death’s scythe symbolic – he never actually uses it to kill people?
Mikep: Yes. Death is a reaper of souls, not a killer.
Which is precisely why I thought it was curious that he had blood on it.
Yes, I did enjoy learning from the Spanish version that mango can mean handle. (It also can mean mango.)
“You can’t handle the mango!”
– First draft, A Few Good Men
The Death of Discworld uses his scythe to separate the soul from the body. It is very sharp.
Mitch, try going to https://www.comicsrss.com/ Just click on the ‘espanol’ at the bottom.
@ Chak (8) – Thanks for the link. ComicsRSS is a wonderful resource, but the point of my gripe is that it shouldn’t be necessary to use a third-party utility: the twits who programmed the new “imporved” Comics Kingdom website should have spent a little more effort on fundamental usability, and wasted less time on idiotic eye candy. Beta testing before the final rollout would have been a good idea, too.
@ Chak (8) – Thanks, that’s a great site. It’s easy to use and has all of the comics in one place.
Thanks for sharing that, Chak!
I read two-thirds of my daily comics and all of the editorial cartoons on my list using ComicsRSS.com – if you have a compatible RSS reader, you can set them all up to appear on one single page (you may need to revise the links, depending on your system).
The reason I started doing this is simple: although the GoComics website is an order of magnitude better than Comics Kingdom, GC has become so cluttered with ads and other unnecessary garbage (like their idiotic “featured comment”) that opening up a dozen comics simultaneously became far too cumbersome (and slow). ComicsRSS is much more efficient.
GoComics becomes much more well-behaved if you are willing to pay for a subscription. Besides some okay-but-I’m-not-cheering email features, the site visits when you are signed-in have most of the features people have been wanting, and avoid most of the features people have mentioned disliking. All your selected cartoons appear on one page, which you can freely scroll up and down. They are in an order you can set up and modify. While you have one comic on your screen , you can click on side buttons to regress in time for viewing the recent past strips, leaving undisturbed the other comics above and below it on your favorites page. And that “featured comment” thing Kilby mentions is not there, as long as you stay on the Favorites page.
What you want to avoid is clicking on something which then becomes the content of the displayed page, and takes you away from the Favorites list. If you want to see the dedicated page of a particular strip, with Overview and About tabs, it would be safest to use your browser’s shift-click option or right-click menu to open in new tab or new window. If you just click and replace the page in-place, using the Back button should manage to get you back to your Favorites list page, but it will probably not be at the same scroll point you had reached before leaving.
The same thing goes for viewing comments, by clicking on the small speech-bubble icon — preferably shift-click or right-click to open in new tab or window. When you have opened the comments page, there will probably be some top-level comments already opened, but not just a single “Featured Comment” of the sort Kilby rightly complains of, unless you choose that from a drop-down menu instead of “Show All Comments”.
Comics Kingdom, on the other hand, has not fully recovered from the disastrous changes made as part of their overall revision earlier this year. Some of the worst of the problems have been resolved, or at least improved, for paid subscribers, though still not fully satisfactory.
To my mind the two worst remaining problems are:
Presenting the user-chosen favorites in what seems to be random order.
There are others, but those are the two I would ask the developers to fix soonest.
I’m sure it is even more frustrating for non-subscriber use!
The mistakes I hate most about the new “imporved” CK website are:
I always feel a little guilty recommending ComicsRSS because I want people to support (as in, pay the dues) for GoComics, but I know not everyone can afford yet another subscription.
Does the RSS feed provide comments? BTW, the new comments display on CK is really bad. GC is so-so, mainly because you can’t open all replies at once.
I agree that the comments on CK are a problem area, from technical viewpoint. Always uncertain to load, and to reply or even leave a thumbs-up the require a fresh sign-in, even if you are signed in to read the comics.
I am a lazy person in general – including reading comics.
I pay for our regional paper to be delivered, but since the start of Covid I am not happy (yet) with putting the paper on my kitchen table to read it (which is where I do so and where I am now on my laptop – only time away from husband is late night when he is upstairs in our office on his computer and I am in kitchen on laptop) so I continue to read the paper online including the strips in same.
On Monday nights (occasionally a Sunday night) I start reading the past week’s comics that I read online. This ends with my coming to CIDU to read same for the past week. (It used to be one to two nights of reading – more recently 3 nights is common – hence why it is Wednesday night now.)
Being a cheap “senior citizen” I do not subscribe to any of the strips/sites. I have not had problems with any of them including GoComics.
@ Brian (17) – The ComicsRSS website doesn’t offer any comments at all, which is one of its most significant advantages.
P.S. @ Chak (16) – I seriously doubt that any of the money that GoComics collects gets pipelined back to the syndicated artists. GC has enough trouble running and funding the website itself, and there are just too many strips involved (and no rational method to divvy up any potential loot).
Neither GC nor CK force comments on you.
Almost all strips on GC are from the parent company Andrews-McMeel Universal. I don’t know what arrangements have been made as far as money. I’d be surprised if Watterson is letting them run Calvin and Hobbes without payment though.
@ Brian (21) – GoComics certainly does inflict a “featured comment” under nearly every strip. As much as I dislike Brooke McEldowney’s incessant soft comic p0rn, at least he was clever enough to get GoComics to disable all comments for both 9CL and Pibgorn. Lynn Johnston and Teresa Burritt should take note.
P.S. Virtually all of the money earned by syndicated authors comes from newspaper and book publishing rights, the residuals from the online archives are extremely minimal. In the specific case of Watterson, he described that he had no rights at all for the first half of Calvin’s run (until the syndicate finally agreed to renegotiate his contract). However, Watterson (and the Schulz estate) are still raking in the cash from all the papers that continue to publish Calvin (and Peanuts) reruns.
“GoComics certainly does inflict a “featured comment” under nearly every strip.”
“Certainly”?? Hmm, my experience with the site is more like what Brian in STL reported. I see comments only when I have either explicitly sought them out by clicking the little speech-bubble icon, or when I have switched from reading in a scroll to pulling a comment into occupying a whole page. In that latter case, yes, some comments appear below the image. But they weren’t “inflicted” on me until I took that step.
Yes there is a featured comment below the strip but with any device I use I have to scroll to see it and so the “inflicted” part is at best an exaggeration. I’m not really seeing the downside.