The Virtual Funnies Pages

Just over a year ago I gave up home delivery of the Boston Globe, due to the elimination of the super-cheap add-on rate I got as a New York Times subscriber. But at that point the only reason I was really getting the Globe was to read the comics, so I reasoned that I could do that online.

I do that now, but it's not quite as easy as you might think. Only a fraction of the comics that run daily in the Globe are available on boston.com's comics page, so I was left to seek out the ones I wanted to read elsewhere.

Most comic strips are distributed to newspapers through syndicating services, so those are the sites you want to visit. They are overloaded with ads and slow to load, but they get the job done.

I now read 15 comics daily, and to do so I need to visit three sites: GoComics, comics.com, and Comics Kingdom, which is sort of a portal template that papers can use to customize a comics page; somehow I ended up using the one that belongs to the Portland Oregonian, but you can also access it via the San Francisco Chronicle or the New Orleans Times-Picayune (quite possibly the greatest newspaper name ever).