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Heathcliff and The Family Circus, 12/1/12

Celebrate, everybody! Three and half weeks of the Holiday Season lie before us, and if these whimsical one-panel cartoons for children are any indication, they will be a singularly grim and joyless affair. Billy is rooting through his box of toys so he can make his list of gift ideas; he literally has so many geegaws that he’s in real danger of getting duplicates. His toys may be spilling out of the top of a box that comes up to his shoulders, but they can never fill his bottomless need. Dolly looks on, expressionless. Meanwhile, Heathcliff, who is a cat and therefore not a participant in human religion or holiday celebration, merely sees the hustle and bustle at the mall as another opportunity to assert his dominance. He’s disrupting a farcical Christmas tradition meant to generate more sales revenues, and neither the bored mall Santa nor the stoop-shouldered children waiting in line can work themselves up to be even slightly upset by his antics.

Archie, 12/1/12

I bet you thought that yesterday’s late-night recycling laffs were just a one-off Archie joke, but no! Morning has come and now Archie and his dad are going down to the recycling center to return … the papers … which are now pamphlets about environmentalism? Or maybe the newspapers are being turned into the pamphlets, right there, at the recycling center? Anyway, the point is that recycling’s for chumps, kids, make sure your newspapers end up in a landfill, or, to go that extra mile, find a small endangered bird and smother it with the sports section!

Herb and Jamaal, 12/1/12

Do people outside of wacky fictional settings ever do elaborately sarcastic performances like this? I mean, it’s one thing to mock your lonely, heartbroken friend by telling him he’s having a “pity party,” but it’s quite another to take off your apron and leave the room and announce that you’re going to make actual concrete preparations for such an event. I certainly hope Herb has the determination to see this thing through to the end and really go to Kinko’s to have something printed up, or at least create a Facebook event and send invites to everyone Jamaal knows.

Ziggy, 12/1/12

God, this squirrel is quite the little name-dropping asshole.

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Archie, 11/30/12

We have proved with painstaking historical research that the current run of Archie newspaper comics originated in the early 1990s. Today’s strip offers more evidence of this: it’s set in a time period where this whole “recycling” business was something that eager, green-minded teens had to teach their hidebound parents, who just wanted to throw all their garbage directly into the water supply, in accordance with the traditions of their ancestors. Unfortunately, the strip’s creators from this era did not have access to any young people (something that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that Archie has always treated teenagers with contempt), so they appear to have reconstructed the recycling process from secondhand reports. It involves having unboxed waist-high piles of neatly folded newspapers on your lawn, right?

Gil Thorp, 11/30/12

I’m pretty sure we’ve never actually seen Terry Gallagher’s dad over the course of this storyline, so I’m kind of intrigued by the fact that Terry’s mom says that he “doesn’t bring her a strategy” when he “messes up.” What kind of “messing up” does he typically perpetrate? Has he been missing for the past few months because of how badly he “messed up”? Not to engage in ugly stereotyping, but isn’t most likely that Mr. Gallagher is drunk in a gutter right now, “messing” himself “up”, with no “strategy” to get back home? Those aren’t footsteps you want to follow in, kid!

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Mary Worth, 11/29/12

You know how you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor has written all kinds of psychology-y stuff on the whiteboard. “Um, ego, id … crap, what’s the third one? I know there’s a third one. Is it dreams? That doesn’t sound right, but half of every lecture is taken up by dumb nineteen-year-olds asking me to interpret their anxiety and/or sex dreams, so I might as well write that up there. Now, Freud and Jung … which one was played by Viggo Mortensen and which by Michael Fassbender? Gotta remember to look that up later.”

You know how else you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor’s lecture makes you visualize the angry, controlling, emotionally damaged young man whose romantic feelings you don’t reciprocate and think “I wish I could break down his barriers and make him love me — but only as a friend.”

Archie, 11/29/12

The Western calendar, derived as it is from ancient Roman and Egyptian models and tweaked over the centuries to match our increasingly accurate measurements of the earth’s revolution around the sun, contains months of varying lengths, leap days subject to complex rules, and a weekly cycle that doesn’t match up exactly with either the monthly or yearly cycles. This actually makes writing calendaring code a fairly tricky computer programming problem! Nevertheless, the rules for Thanksgiving are relatively simple — it’s the fourth Thursday in November, not the last Thursday, which means that someone on the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 programming team seems to have made something of a goof.

Crankshaft, 11/29/12

hate contempt rage bitterness misguided attempts to please a mother who can never feel love HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ALL OF US IN THE FUNKYVERSE, EVERYBODY