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I remain awfully fond of reading newspaper comics. I have not in several years not subscribed to the newspaper in print, but I read a broader and generally more rewarding cross-section of comics now than I did then. There's such a relentless flood of them that I cannot take much time off before it begins to be a prohibitive burdon to get caught up. In fact, I recently did have such an incident, and recovering was some task.

I'm not sure how it began that I neglected the task of reading them at first. It wouldn't have been more than a day or two that I somehow didn't have the time, but each day makes the next harder, and before I knew it I had a backlog hundreds of individual strips on multiple websites. I did manage to keep up on some of them, but the bulk remained to be read when I went on vacation. At that time, it was something like two weeks or so of strips.

Of course I did not manage to read any of them while on vacation, during which time I hardly managed to get my writing done, and that a habit nearly as deeply ingrained in me as breathing. As a result of that, I was left with a backlog of around a month of comics. Most people would not be so invested in the likes of Snuffy Smith or Mary Worth that they would proceed to work down the backlog. They would just skip ahead, or forget the whole thing.

I am of course no more "most people" now than I ever have been, and so I felt some kind of obligation to get caught up. It was such a Herculean labor that I couldn't do it in one day or even a couple. I would venture to guess that it took several days of devoting more time than I ought to have on reading to get caught up. What's the reward? Well, I do enjoy the comics, and knowing that the burden is lifted will result in greater productivity, so that's something.