Where to put your money during the coming recession

A Candorville comic strip

As also seen at Comics Kingdom, and at Arcamax, where the comments section beneath this and my editorial cartoons might as well be called the Mos Eisley Cantina, since it’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy (that is your only geeky reference for today).

Someone who calls herself “Dreamer” posts there. For several years, she seemed to wake up at midnight to post the very first comment beneath each Candorville comic strip. And each comment misrepresented the point of that day’s strip and cast it in the worst light possible. I ignored that for quite a while, until I saw that others began commenting based on her wrong interpretation of the strip, rather than on what the strip itself said. She also went to GoComics, and did the same thing beneath my work there, too, under a different screen name.

After years of this, I couldn’t help myself. I suggested that she stop stalking me, stop obsessively hate-reading Candorville, and get a life. And stop she did, until last week. The troll is back at Arcamax, and she’s up to her old tricks.

I used to read comments sections at sites that posted my work because I was eager to have conversations with readers. A decade ago, it was fun. But somewhere along the line, most comments sections have become something else. People talk past each other, not to each other. Decent people once outnumbered trolls. Now that’s flipped.

And with four small children, I no longer have the time or the patience to sift through the trolls to find posts worth responding to. So I think I’m going to only talk to people here at Substack. So far, Substack seems to be several star systems away from Tatooine (okay, one last geeky reference).