Looks like the nays have it and I'll keep posting the comics with the caption in the image, as before. I've added a number to the title for making it easy to differentiate between each strip (which will aid in scripting the posting).
What do people think of that? If that's also too much I can go back to just the date for the title.
My recommendation would be to keep the website published date as the title. Having the original publication date would give to much context to the timeless strip.
I'm not sure we need numberings in the title, unless the original published comics had them.
If searchability is the problem that needs solved, then a tagging system would work. Stuff like "cow, hammer, car accident" but this would be cumbersome for a title. Lemmy should have a separate system for that. I've never checked, if there is a feature request forum for lemmy, user generated tags would make lemmy the best user generated content platform to search on.
IMO the original comic shouldn't be altered. I like the caption being in the title of the post though, but I also like it having the publication date. I guess my ideal would be unaltered image, plus a post title of "<Frame Caption> | <Publication Date>", but that might be too much for you to bother with
Reading the caption before seeing the image definitely weakened today's comics for me.
Captions of Far Side comics are often effectively punchlines, clarifying whatever weirdness was drawn in the comic. Reading the words and then seeing the image feels disjointed, and loses a lot of the "punch."
Don't like it either. The way I browse, I often click on images directly which doesn't show the title text.
I see Farside comics and I expect to either see the caption under the drawing, or see the lack of a caption and know the joke is in the image. I thought this one didn't have a caption, and was frankly confused a little.
I think having the text caption makes sense from a searchability perspective, though I side more with the comment that worries about weakening the impact of the punchline by putting it above the comic. Compromise and put the caption in the post body, maybe behind spoiler tags?