Geeky goodness

My morning routine includes, before I get to the New York Times, taking in a few of the newspaper comics that I most like: Doonesbury (of course), as well as Zits (life with/as a 16-year-old boy — whatever happened to the movie version), Stone Soup (the adventures of two kinda-real families), Heart of the City (a precocious 5-year-old diva and her geeky best friend Dean), and above all Monty.

Ah, Monty. How shall I praise thee? Let me count the ways as an <ol>ordered list</ol>.

1. Monty is an unattractive middle-aged man
2. He has no visible means of support for most of the time, although sometimes he works in stores or has short-term stints working on documentaries. His jobs are basically just a background for humorous situations to develop. Most of them last for just one comic-strip.
3. I think his ambition is to be a comic-strip writer.
4. His best friend is Moondog, his college roommate, who is a beer-drinking slob — his apartment is like a landfill, although most landfills don’t come with cable.
5. Mooddog owns a parrot, Pilsner, who is intelligent enough to hold a conversation with but who doesn’t realize that his reflection is not in fact a roommate.
6. Monty owns a hairless cat called “Fleshy.”
7. Monty has an alien friend called “Mr. Pi” or “Dave”
8. He also is currently putting up a time-traveller from the future, called simply “Doc” (or sometimes, I think) “The Professor.” What, you expect me to keep track of all this? Or do research?
9. And at the moment some kind of bio-clone-android is visiting from the future as well.
10. Monty has a crush on a waitress called Gretchen, who does not reciprocate his affections. That’s because she’s the token “normal person” in the strip.
11. He used to have a girlfriend! Called Loco Ohno. But they split up a few years ago. She was a radical feminist who hated men.
12. And he was recently in an abusive relationship with a female biker whom he was afraid to break up with.
13. Good grief! What is this: the Spanish inquisition? Enough with the questions, already!

The comic strip began life as Robotman in 1985, although I only started reading it regularly about three years ago (about the time Monty and Loco split up). It’s baffled me that there are no Monty books. There are some very old Robotman books, but they are mostly out of print and used copies sell for astronomical amounts.

But here’s the fantastic thing. The Monty website now no longer displays only a couple of weeks’-worth of strips, but has an archive going back to March 18, 2001. That gives me (um, 2008 minus 2001, is um) SEVEN YEARS of Monty comic strips! I am one happy bunny!

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