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Oh my goodness, the site’s been all rearranged! More information about the redesign can be found on the Internet.

Curtis, 1/4/10

Oh, right, Kwanzaa! If there’s one thing that keeps me from viewing the purchase of a new calendar as just another step on the ever-descending spiral towards death, it’s the annual Curtis Kwanzaa fable of hallucinatory madness. I generally tear through the first half of the tale with joy when I return from my Christmas travels. Past adventures have included:

This year’s story, involving nightmarish soul-stealing shadow-things, talking, styled animals, and all-knowing rhythm instruments, while whimsical and awesome when measured by other yardsticks, is thus rather pedestrian by when viewed in the Curtis Kwanzaa context. Still, today our hero appears to be passing through a magic mirror into the realm of the dead, so perhaps things might be looking up. I’d also like to point out that his sentient animal friends can speak and think like humans but, since they cannot enter the spirit realm, apparently do not have souls, which to my mind makes them by far the creepiest part of this whole drama so far.

Pluggers, 1/4/10

Speaking of monstrous, soulless beasts, let’s check in with Pluggers! Let’s see, yep, same old same old, pluggers are casting their minds back to a bygone age and … finding it … wanting? OH MY GOD EVERYTHING I KNOW IS WRONG! Is 2010 the year pluggers finally get with the times? What’s next? “Pluggers will suffer a witch to live”? MADNESS!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/4/10

This strip would be funny (well, OK, not funny per se, but at least not so unsettling) if Ol’ Lukey were laffin’ it up with his fellow rustics in the second panel, rather than just sort of staring off into space looking befuddled and a little frightened. As it is, it appears that this elderly hillbilly is falling into corn likker-accelerated dementia, unable to remember where he’s going and why at any given moment. Soon he’ll be receiving Hootin’ Holler’s version of elder care (e.g., abandonment on a rocky hillside to be eaten by grizzlies).