Frazz (2025)

08/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/08
It’s clear that I’m bothered, and to an embarrassing extent, by that small portion of friends who feel I hurt myself by being somehow reckless. It’s not so much that they seem to think I’m foolish — I’m used to that — but that I get defensive and think they’re foolish. Yes, a unicycle is inherently unstable. There’s some risk in that. But that instability is what makes it the perfect device for improving my balance, my proprioception, my awareness and my fitness in general, which mitigates many of the other hazards of aging (thanks, Internet, for the flood of that type of article). It seems a pretty good risk/return ratio. You know what else is a risk of aging? Mentioning television instead of social media or doomscrolling as the truly problematic behavior. How quaint. But we’ll say that’s because Frazz is talking to Mrs. Olsen, who seems much more the type to diminish her quality of life with the former.
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As for the crash — my own crash — here’s how reckless it was: It’s a stretch even to call it a crash, because it’s a stretch to say I was moving. I was about four uneventful miles into a ride, got in over my head testing myself through a field of potholes and had to restart. You mount a unicycle by straddling it with the wheel in front of you with the pedals leveled. Place a foot on the rear pedal, hop up and plant your other foot on the forward pedal and get the wheel underneath you. Overshoot that hop and you have to get the wheel moving forward. Fail to do that and you keep going off the front. Trip on the (very grippy) pedal, and you might even land on your hands and knees. Then you get up and try again. Which is what happened, except when I tried getting up, my knee seemed to have some mechanical issues (also it hurt). I was the equivalent of the solid novice skier who face-plants getting off the chairlift. I hadn’t landed hard (indeed, there wasn’t even an abrasion to speak of on my bare knee); I just hit at the precise wrong angle, and that was that. For irony, if I ever had landed hard on a knee, I’d probably have supplemented my helmet and wrist guards with knee pads. Instead, they didn’t seem necessary until they were.

07/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/07
And we’re back to the Lucretius Problem. Which, to be fair, is real enough to feel worth emphasizing. Although the fact that Mrs. Olsen is interested in an accurate version could be leading up to something. I swear, I draw the lady and write her lines and I never fully know what she’s up to.

06/07/2025

Where’s the lagniappe? On the edge of the main strip.

06/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/06
Welcome to the difference between lead times vis a vis daily (weekday) strips and Sunday ones. And subsequently to just how last-minute I can be coming up with a story line. I had already been on crutches a month when I drew up today’s episode. Indeed, I had no plans to insert my own broken leg, nor the story behind it, into the strip. But then …

I regularly donate a cameo role in Frazz to be auctioned off at my town’s big, annual Men’s Club charity auction. Because of my hobbled state, it took me a while to meet with the high bidder to get a feel for how best to maximize their purchase while fitting it into the strip smoothly enough that it didn’t look out of the strip’s character. Once I did meet with them, though, I had my answer, and my summer theme, and … a problem with the incongruity you see right now. At least it involves a leg injury. Wrong injury, wrong leg, even. And a totally different backstory and message. Other than that, pretty seamless, right?

05/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/05
When I was a teen-ager, my future brother-in-law got his hands on some fireworks — a scandalous thing, as consumer fireworks then were, if not black market, extremely dark gray market. Specifically, he had gotten hold of some bottle rockets. Had I known that’s what they were called, and taken the time to think about it, I might have used them properly. But those sticks that held the little missiles in their bottle-turned-launch-pad sure looked like little stakes you’d stick into the ground, and I found myself wondering what the big deal was with fireworks. I know how a bottle rocket works now, but I still don’t get fireworks. I’ll go to the shows, because a big gathering of people is interesting whether or not things are loudly and slightly stinkily exploding overhead. I might even comment, “that was a good one,” and I’ll have a good time. After all, why limit good times to things you understand?

04/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/04
And this concludes the stretch where I abuse my station to argue my case in front of an audience that already knows me well, can’t argue back in real time and was largely on my side in the first place. It was vaguely satisfying but not as much fun as telling an actual story. So I guess we can cross “online influencer” off my list of future careers. There! Happy ending.

03/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/03
Uh oh. Sometimes when you mine your own life for material, there are byproducts in the ore. And I guess the smelting process for today’s episode didn’t remove a certain amount of impatience with unsolicited advice involving selling certain equipment on eBay. Sorry about that. I’m sure I’ve tweaked the furnace since.

02/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/02
One of these days you may hear of the Lucretius Problem, a c***k in human intellect wherein we have a tendency to think that the worst thing that can happen can’t be worse than the worst thing that we’ve already seen.

Not to quibble with the experts, nor with the eponymous Roman philosopher, but I’ve recently had the opportunity to notice a contrary counterpart: that people who have never, ever seen or experienced a unicycle accident of any magnitude will imagine the accident you had as far worse than the worst unicycle accident they’ve already seen. Or haven’t.

Mind you, I can understand how, given the known outcome of this accident, people would imagine a fireball of a wipeout that that would correspond to its consequences. And I hope I never complain about anyone’s active imagination. And now I’m having fun imagining Titus Lucretius Carus on a unicycle. In a toga and sandals. What’s the worst that can happen?

01/07/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/07/01
All in all, it’s not something I would have chosen for myself. But I will take a certain amount of pride in that every ER worker who asked — and there is very little those people haven’t seen — responded with some variation on, “That’s new.”

30/06/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/06/30
And so the self-larceny begins in earnest. Though not completely accurately. For instance, I never wore an articulated brace like that. Just a plain old straight one, and that only in the days between the emergency suite and the surgical suite. Once I was bolted back together,* there was no brace at all just crutches. There was talk of a hinged brace once I got off the crutches, but I was apparently deemed to have enough leg strength to render that unnecessary. But the more welcome inaccuracy is that, while, yes, Frazz will be similarly enduring the consequences of a similar accident to mine, the story won’t end up all about Frazz. Or me. Although there will be some self-indulgence. I mean, come on. A story’s a story.
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* for those more curious than squeamish, I landed on my knee lightly (leaving not even the slightest strawberry of an abrasion) but with apparent diamond-cutter precision and sheared off my lateral epicondyle, which is that big k**b at the end of the femur so the bone can become part of the knee and so cartoonists can draw the bone. It was reattached with five screws (for reference, visit the Home Depot and wander the deck hardware aisle), followed by eight weeks on crutches. Followed by a lot of physical therapy and a lot more patience. It’s all going very well, thank you, and it’s way to early to wonder about what I might be able to do a year or five from now. But I was fortunate enough to be fairly fit going into this, and very fortunate to land the surgeon I did. And fortunate/unfortunate enough to already be quite familiar with a terrific PT clinic. Onward. And already without a noticeable limp.

29/06/2025

The singer-songwriter Todd Snider said he’s not into sports, but he loves baseball. And that’s because baseball isn’t a sport; it’s an art. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it does seem like a culture, and the more I learn about it the more I like it. I may come around yet.

29/06/2025

https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/06/29
To everything there is a season. And apparently a time to ignore that season and a time to try to control those seasons yourself or at least a time to gripe at how the seasons don’t wrap themselves around the (usually non-native) putting green we’re trying to get our lawns to resemble. Turn, turn, turn.

Frazz

08/07/2025

07/07/2025

06/07/2025

06/07/2025

05/07/2025

04/07/2025

03/07/2025

02/07/2025

01/07/2025

30/06/2025

29/06/2025

29/06/2025

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