John Scully’s ‘The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day’ Is Expert Trolling Of The Newspaper Page

Newspaper comic strips tend to run pretty long, so when they finally do end, it's usually a big deal. You get things like the end of Little Orphan Annie, which capped off its 84-year run by having Annie kidnapped and in dire peril, and when Tom Batiuk's John Darling ended, he had the lead character literally murdered on-panel, sparking a mystery that would be solved years later in Funky Winkerbean.

Unlike superhero comics, though, where cancellations and relaunches are a pretty common occurrence, you can really only do the final installment of a newspaper strip once. Unless, that is, you're John Scully, who launched  The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day on May 1, and has been running a strip where a cast of characters bids farewell to their readers every day. The same strip. The exact same strip.

Just for the record, that's the latest strip pictured above. Here's the first one:

We're well into the second month of TCSTHAFED, and whether it's meant to be a commentary on the repetitive nature of newspaper comics --- Garfield hates Mondays, y'all --- or just an experiment in seeing how long it can go before it actually gets to its really real final finale, remains to be seen. All I know is that when I started reading through the archives and figured out that there are weeks of this, complete with comments from readers leaving fond and occasionally furious farewells, it was hilarious.

I definitely agree with this guy, though:

The strip runs daily at GoComics.com.

[via Kyle Baker]