My Daily Ink subscription

I've subscribed to King Features' dailyink.com for over six years.  Each day the new comics appear at 1:00 in the morning. (Yeah, I stay up too late.) Here's the comic strips I read there.

Current strips:

JUDGE PARKER, APARTMENT 3G, MARY WORTH, REX MORGAN MD:  Four "soap opera" strips that I read so I can keep up with Josh Fruehlinger, who often discusses them at The Comics Curmudgeon.

JUDGE PARKER is about rich, relentlessly successful people (Tony Soprano said "In this house it's still 1954"; in Judge Parker's world it's still 1986!); APARTMENT 3G is about three single women in a Manhattan flat; Mary Worth is a biddy relentlessly giving her condo neighbors free advice; Rex Morgan MD is, of course, a doctor.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN:  The superhero comic strip, also frequently discussed by Josh. (He may be the laziest superhero of our time:  in a recent episode his alter ego Peter Parker, secretly hitching a ride on a truck, used his superpowers to craft a super-hammock!)

MARK TRAIL:  A rather goofy strip about a nature journalist always getting into fist fights with villains who wear mustaches. (I remember reading the Sunday "Trail Ways" feature back when I was a kid.)

THE PHANTOM:  A non-PC strip about a masked jungle vigilante fighting pirates and crooks.  Lee Falk created it in the 1930s, a period that produced several masked vigilantes:  other examples are The Lone Ranger and Batman.  For me, it's a guilty pleasure. (It's one of the only comic strips that still runs separate continuing stories on weekdays and on Sundays, which used to be the norm for King Features.)

MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN:  Lee Falk's other classic strip, now weekdays only.  I read it out of nostalgia for when it was better.

FUNKY WINKERBEAN:  This Tom Batiuk strip's gone through a remarkable evolution.  In the 1970s and 1980s, it was about a group of high-school kids; later they skipped ahead and made them young adults; in recent years they've been middle-aged.  With these changes, the strip's got more serious and mature.  Josh often makes fun of the strip's depressing storylines. (I used to follow its spinoff strip CRANKSHAFT, about an aged, curmudgeonly school bus driver.)

SLYLOCK FOX:  Another guilty pleasure.  I read it for the kiddie mysteries, though they're often easy to solve. (I used to enjoy the Encyclopedia Brown books too.)

PRINCE VALIANT and FLASH GORDON:  These strips only appear on Sundays, and I read them out of nostalgia too.

Now for the classic strips, the real reason I pay good money for my subscription. (As Giuseppe would say, "Now we can cook with gas!")

RIP KIRBY:  Created by a post-FLASH GORDON Alex Raymond just after World War II, it's about a supercool detective who's a man of action but uses his brains as much as his weapons.  I read it faithfully when I was a kid.

BRICK BRADFORD:  A 1930s Clarence Gray action strip notable for the sheer range of its stories.  It's title hero visits the Amazon jungle, the land of the Vikings, western frontier lands, the inside of an atom, and there's even been DICK TRACY-style street fighting with gangsters.

BUZ SAWYER:  A 1940s strip created by Roy Crane after he left CAPTAIN EASY.  Its title hero started out as a navy pilot fighting Japan, but just now he's a professional trouble-shooter working for an international corporation. (There was a fad for that type of postwar hero:  Captain Easy did it too.)

FLASH GORDON:  They're reprinting episodes from the 1950s here.  Even after Alex Raymond left, it still attracted some good artists:  at this time Mac Raboy did the Sundays and Dan Barry the weekdays.

THE PHANTOM and MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN:  Both Lee Falk strips in their early years. (I like the catchphrase of Mandrake's sidekick Lothar: "Me smash!")

THE HEART OF JULIET JONES:  Roy Crane's romantic strip, from its early days in the 1950s.  My favorite character is Julie's erratic little sister Eve.

BIG BEN BOLT:  Another 1950s strip, by John Cullen Murphy (who later took over PRINCE VALIANT).  This one's about a young white man from a Boston Brahmin family who becomes a champion boxer.  The concept wasn't laughable back then.

BEETLE BAILEY:  The classic military humor strip, from its early days in the 1950s.

RADIO PATROL:  A police strip from the 1940s. (In its most recent story they were catching Nazi spies.)

KING OF THE ROYAL MOUNTED:  I'm interested in this strip just because I'm Canadian. (When we were briefly in Britain in the 1960s we got a couple of comic books reprinted from the strip for the British market.)

JUDGE PARKER:  Stories reprinted from the Swinging Sixties when ace lawyer Sam Driver first met zillionairess Abby Spencer. (They're now married, and successful as ever.) Fascinatingly dated.