Opinion: Work them like a claw and call me Number One!

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Congratulations to Josh Fruhlinger, the Comics Curmudgeon. For my money he’s the Bernard Berenson of the funny pages, who not only shares my enthusiasm for the soap opera strips but has shown me the hidden treasures of cartoons I either didn’t know about, like Get Fuzzy, or had never paid any attention to, like Slylock Fox. A few months back he diagnosed the disease at the heart of the comics page in a Times Op/Ed that the papers continue to ignore at their peril.

So nobody is more deserving of The Week magazine’s uncoveted Blogger-of-the-Year award, which Fruhlinger took home a few days ago. I especially applaud The Week, for acknowledging somebody who isn’t singlehandedly saving the Middle East or organizing election groundswells, but dealing with pop-culture artifacts that aren’t immediately recognizable as weighty or important. (Though they did give the award for the CC‘s work on editorial cartoons rather than his more free-ranging criticism of the daily comic strips.) With the newspapers’ increasingly untenable mandate to bring you the world every morning, Fruhlinger’s is the kind of smartass, pomo meta-analysis that actually adds value to its chosen subject, and while I’d doubt anybody is hanging on the results of The Week‘s awards for anything, there are few people who deserve free food and drinks and a trophy more than the Comics Curmudgeon.