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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/3/24

Sure, we’re being told that this crowd is CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!ing in big red letters, but by their faces, they don’t look that enraptured, do they? This makes sense because honestly, the audience for a self-help group/cult tour making its second pass through a smallish city would logically be mostly made up of (a) people who had already bought into the cult idea and are now unsettled to learn that the cult has a new leader and (b) people who only came in the hopes that Mud would play “Muddy Boots” and, like, who cares if this cult has just undergone a leadership reshuffle, really? Is that going to make them play “Muddy Boots” any sooner? Because frankly they’re just talking a lot about who really founded the cult and that can only push “Muddy Boots” time further back.

Family Circus, 1/3/24

I genuinely love how haunted both Jeffy and Grandma look here. Grandma obviously is really wounded that the kids just walked out in the middle of some story that was obviously quite meaningful to her, possibly about her beloved husband, the grandfather they never knew. Jeffy, meanwhile, is thinking “World exist before Jeffy? This mean teddy bear still exist when under blanket and Jeffy can’t see???”

Blondie, 1/3/24

I also genuinely love the Red Bull empties on Dagwood’s desk. He tried! He really tried! But if he can stay rail-thin despite his shockingly inhuman food consumption habits, you’d better believe that a few thousand milligrams of caffeine and taurine aren’t going to be enough to keep his synapses firing.

Shoe, 1/3/24

I will admit that this is a perfectly serviceable bit of wordplay, but I do want to point out that they give this lefty-loving bird lady a headband, because only a dirty hippie would ever date a socialist! Just to drive the point home, Roz is using the red flag of world revolution to wipe the crumbs off her counter.

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The Lockhorns, 12/23/23

Usually a crinkly smile on Leroy means that he’s in the midst of being dramatically drunk, but I’m not quite sure what vibe he’s supposed to be giving off here. Maybe it’s something like “Yeah, that’s right, we argue. We argue a lot. It gets us all revved up. So you two wanna swing or what?”

Slylock Fox, 12/23/23

Turns out the Forest Kingdom has some kind of Henchman Christmas Party where Max and Count Weirdly’s little genetic experiments get to hang out and exchange gifts! In an ideal world, they’d also be plotting to rise up against their respective masters and seize control of the world for themselves, but that would require a level of class consciousness and basic competence that none of them have ever demonstrated.

Blondie, 12/23/23

“Ha ha, self-checkout machines! They sure, uh, exist, right? The modern world, whaddya gonna do! Well, that’s a joke, probably, time to go play golf.” –the Blondie brain trust, it seems

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Blondie, 12/21/23

Huh, well, I guess “Josh uses his dumb blog about comic strips to talk about the infancy narratives in the Bible” year had to come around eventually, and it looks like 2023 is the year! Anyway, a fun fact about the infancy narratives, plural, is that there are two of them, one in the Gospel of Matthew and the other the Gospel of Luke (John and Mark just jump right into Jesus’s baptism and ministry), and they are almost completely different from one another, beyond the basics of the virgin birth happening in Bethlehem. Matthew (and only Matthew) has the killing of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt; there’s no indication in that story that Mary and Joseph aren’t already living in Bethlehem, and it’s explicitly stated that they end up in Nazareth to get away from King Herod’s son and successor. Only Luke has the stuff about Mary and John the Baptist’s mother being cousins, and only Luke has the story about the census bringing the family to Bethlehem and Mary giving birth; afterwards they go home (to Nazareth, in this version) and there’s no mention of Egypt at all.

But because both these stories were canonized, most people have an idea of the infancy narrative that basically just mashes all these incidents together into one sequence. Even the colorful characters that appear together in manger scenes are actually from two completely different stories: the wise men, guided by a star, are in Matthew, while the shepherds, summoned by an angel, are in Luke. This is a long way to get to my point, which is: A GPS joke would’ve worked better with wise men rather than shepherds, right? Like, I guess technically they’re coming in from the fields, but Bethlehem was a pretty small city back then, and the wise men are coming from a completely different country. Frankly, I think whoever wrote this joke is kind of mixing the shepherds and the wise men up, so — and here’s a sentence that I’m frankly proud could be found nowhere else but on Josh reads dot com, your source for newspaper comics and musings on the textual history of Christianity — I firmly believe that today’s Blondie really demonstrates the complex ways that these two contradictory narratives have become a single story in our collective mindset.

Beetle Bailey, 12/21/23

Beetle Bailey is frankly almost as old as the Bible, and its devoted readers have internalized its logic as dogma, so I guess it can get away with doing a strip where Beetle’s like “What if it’s not sunny tomorrow” and then Sarge says “Then I’m going to beat you into unconsciousness.” Doesn’t make it right, though! Doesn’t make it right.

Hi and Lois, 12/21/23

This year, Hi and Lois is letting us know about the real meaning of Christmas: being stiffed by retailers and your boss, and then forcing yourself to attend social obligations with people you hate. I do think that Hi and Thirsty genuinely like each other, or at least have trauma bonded at their job, but you have to admit it’d be pretty funny if the whole gang were saying all this while heading over to the Thurstons, their neighbors and also two of the few people we ever see them interacting with socially.

Pluggers, 12/21/23

If a plugger slips and falls on the ice, and no one is around to hear, because he’s alienated his family with his unhinged Facebook posts and his neighbors with his extremely bad vibes, and then he slowly freezes to death out there, taking his final breath on Christmas morning, vaguely hearing happier people laughing and enjoying each other’s company … wait, what was the question again? Anyway, pluggers, please salt your front walk, I’m begging you.