1. Verify that you have the required executables display, sed and wget installed (use e.g. whereis display), and write down the paths to them.
2. Save the text below (starting with #!/bin/sh) to a file.
3. If necessary, edit the PATH= line in the script to include the paths you found in part 1.
4. Make the file executable by opening a command window and typing chmod u+x filename.
5. Run the file by typing ./filename. You should only see lines beginning with "Viewing the URL ...", and then comics should appear on your screen.
6. Now edit the bottom section of the script to get the comics you want!

#!/bin/sh

# This script retrieves and displays selected comics from the web.
# It requires "display" (a part of ImageMagick) and "wget".
# It was written by Michael Miller (millermj@maple.lemoyne.edu), 
# and was last edited on 03-Aug-2000.

# To add a new comic to the list below, navigate to a web page 
# on which the comic appears, and denote that page's URL by "$3".  
# Determine the URL of the comic image itself (in Netscape, 
# right-click on the comic and choose "View Image").  Look for 
# the ending of the comic's URL in the page source, write a regular 
# expression which matches this ending, and denote this regular 
# expression by "$2".  Denote the beginning of the comic's URL 
# by "$0" (so that the full URL of the comic matches $0$2).  Now 
# write a stanza below as
#    URL="$0"`Extract 1 "$2" "$3"`
#    View $URL

PATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/X11"

Extract(){
# "Extract $1 $2 $3"  extracts the $1-th occurence of 
# the regular expression $2 from the web page with URL $3.
 wget $3 -q -O - | sed -n -e"s%^.*\($2\).*$%\1%p" | sed -n $1p
}

View(){
# "View $1" views the image given by the URL $1.
 echo "Viewing the URL" $1
 wget $1 -q -O - | display -display :0 &
}

#----------------------------------------------------------

#www.usrfriendly.org/cartoons
URL="http://www.userfriendly.org"`Extract 1 \
    "/cartoons/archives/[0-9]*[a-z]*/xuf[0-9]*.gif" \
    "http://userfriendly.org/static/"`
View $URL

#www.doonesbury.com/dailydose
URL="http://www.doonesbury.com"`Extract 1 \
    "/dailydose/strips/[0-9]*/[0-9]*/db[0-9]*.gif" \
    "http://www.doonesbury.com/dailydose/"`
View $URL

#www.msnbc.com/comics
for COMIC in bz   #bizzarro
do
   URL1="http://www.msnbc.com"`Extract 1 \
        "/comics/daily.asp?sType=[0-9]&sImage=$COMIC[0-9]*&nDate=0" \
        "http://www.msnbc.com/comics/"`
   URL2="http://www.msnbc.com/comics/"`Extract 1 \
        "comics/$COMIC[0-9]*.gif" $URL1`
   View $URL2
done  

#comics.com/comics
for COMIC in bc nonsequitur
do
   URL="http://comics.com"`Extract 1 \
       "/comics/$COMIC/archive/images/$COMIC[0-9]*.gif" \
       "http://comics.com/comics/$COMIC/ab.html"`
   View $URL
done

#comics.com/universal
for COMIC in boondocks closehome
do
   URL="http://comics.com"`Extract 1 \
       "/universal/$COMIC/archive/images/$COMIC[0-9]*.gif" \
       "http://comics.com/universal/$COMIC/ab.html"`
   View $URL
done