Tag Archives: The Phantom Empire

Some optional reading for you, in the unlikely event you have nothing better to do than wait for today’s strip to drop after midnight EDT.

Readers, earlier I touched upon recent changes at the syndicate’s website that make it impossible to view some strips ahead of time. I won’t bore you with the behind the scenes, nor do I wish to once again run afoul of Batiuk’s lawyers, and so I’ll spare you the minutiae. Simply stated, we here at SoSF use a weird trick to peep each day’s strip a couple days ahead of time. If we didn’t, our dedicated team of writers would have to stay up very late to compose each day’s analysis. I know very many of you live outside the GMT-5 time zone, and/or are night owls, so we’re happy to let you all have at each day’s Funky as early as we can bring it to you. Here on the east coast, when I check SoSF I see dozens of comments. Lately in fact, we’re getting more comments, and a rash of former lurkers turned eloquent and valued commenters. The volume of traffic is not anywhere near what you’d find at the Comics Curmudgeon or Comics Kingdom (both which I know many of us read and comment upon). But this little comics snark blog over which I’ve presided for the past ten years is the funniest and friendliest online community I’ve ever known.

And we intend to keep bringing you Son of Stuck Funky at least up until FW hits fifty years on Sunday, March 27, 2022, or whenever Mr. Thomas Martin Batuik puts down the Funky Felt Tip. Kindly note, however, that for the first ten days of each new month, each day’s strip won’t appear online until after midnight. After that first week and a half, we start getting strips in dribs and drabs. And Sunday and Wednesday strips are never accessible ahead of time.

So now you know why you sometimes find a “today’s strip is unavailable” link. It’s also why we’re switching up the author rotation a bit: myself or Epicus will take turns covering that first week and a half of new strips. So that no guest author will ever again get stuck like poor spacemanspiff1985 getting stuck with a week and a half of nothing to write about (and Spiff did an outstanding job as he always does). Look for a placeholder post with that magic link that should take you to the latest fresh Funky hell, at midnight or shortly thereafter. Subsequent days will be covered by the rest of our awesome, unpaid staff in ten- or eleven-day stints (instead of the former two weeks).

As always, my most humble thanks to Team SoSF and to everyone here who faithfully reads and/or comments.