ERNIE BUSHMILLER WAS AWESOME

Bill Griffith, of Zippy fame, was the one who turned me onto Ernie Bushmiller's genius. Now Griffith has written a graphic novel biography called "Three Rocks: The Ernie Bushmiller Story". Here are excerpts.

Sorry for missing two weeks of weekly links! I was hiding in a bunker in fear of one of the 84293 world-wide crises this month that I now only vaguely remember.

• David Rees did all of his excellent/horrible annual top ten lists for the year.
• I previously linked to A Lesson Is Learned. The writer also did another web comic, based more on story arcs, called The Nerds Of Paradise.
• The catchy song at the top of the post is from a Bollywood movie about all the western hippies who kept coming to India to learn about Hinduism (etc.) but also kept encouraging local young people to take drugs and have orgies, leading to a moral panic.
• Nothing Happens
• At one point in history, backmasking turned into a very popular conspiracy theory. This site lets you play suspected backmasks forwards and backwards, and you try to guess what satanic message they're supposed to encode. Once you read the conspiracy message, you can't hear anything else.
• The original Bushmiller run of Nancy was probably the greatest newspaper comic strip ever made. A lot of people at the time recognized this and wrote long analyses where they begrudgingly admitted to loving a comic they hate, and praised Bushmiller while saying things like he was too much of a sub-human idiot to understand his own genius. Here is one of the better and more interesting examples of that genre.