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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/19/22

We’ve all wondered about the circumstances of the elaborate gift-giving sequence in “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” and especially about its emphasis on birds. Well, what if the gift giver actually stole those birds, for his hungry true love to eat? Really makes you think, doesn’t it?

Dennis the Menace, 12/19/22

I can’t decide which kind “Italian accent” is funnier here: “Eyyyy, I got my eyes on you, kid, so don’t screw up, capisce? Badda boom badda bing” or “MAMA MIA! THE IMMIGRANTS, WE-A TAKING YOUR MALL SANTA JOBS!”

Mary Worth, 12/19/22

Sorry, I know the bolding in Mary’s word balloon is supposed make her sound surprised, but look at her face. She is absolutely saying “Wow, what are the odds of that” in a complete monotone. Sorry, Iris, did you hear that Wilbur fell off a boat and survived but let everyone think he was dead for a week because he loves drama? Your “boo hoo, I’m just as beautiful as my rich hunky himbo fiance’s beautiful baby sitter” story is not cutting it. You have to up your damn game!

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Marvin, 12/18/22

OK, today’s Marvin is dumb and bad and revolves around a terrible “women be shopping!!!!” premise, but I still found it very funny, mostly because of the fact that Jeff has brought in a big stack of cash as a visual aid for his “no gifts” pitch. Not sure if he genuinely thought this would help drive the point home and it terribly backfired or if he just doesn’t trust the banking system and all the family’s assets are in piles of bills around the house, but either way, I love it, and I love how Jenny demonstrates one of the major downsides of physical currency in the next to last panel.

Dennis the Menace, 12/18/22

I feel bad for Margaret, who probably has a lot of intelligent things to say about a healthy diet but who has been reduced to a voiceless prop in Dennis’s eternal war with his mother. She deserves better! Like, today she deserves better, but also all other days. Maybe I’m just a resentful redhead who’s been called “carrot top” one too many times but I feel strongly about this.

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/06/22

It probably shouldn’t surprise you to learn I have been a daily comics reader for more or less my entire life. But until I really got started on this blog, that meant that I read the daily comics that were printed in whatever newspaper I was reading at the time, which meant there was a decade-long gap in my daily Funky Winkerbean readership straddling Y2K, a period during which the strip made its now-infamous Turn To Grim, and even now I’m still putting together the pieces of what all happened in the strip during that stretch. Like, someone bombed the Westview post office? Sure, why not!

One thing I do know happened during that period is that Lisa had breast cancer, then went into remission, then her cancer came back, but the hospital mixed up her lab results so she was told she was fine and the whole thing wasn’t figured out until it was too late. In the real world, this is the sort of mistake that would have resulted in multiple lawsuits, and in a world where a janitor from the future was subtly manipulating things behind the scenes, it seems like it would be a very easy mistake to fix, certainly easier than convincing a top neonatal physician to keep living it a shitty town like Westview. But you have to remember that Lisa was primarily important as the Birthing Vessel for the Chosen One, so once Summer was born, all extraordinary or indeed ordinary measures to keep her alive immediately ceased.

Dennis the Menace, 12/6/22

What exactly is Alice forbidding Dennis from doing in the first panel here? Is she telling him that, as five-year-old children, he and Joey are not allowed to just wander out into the wintertime by themselves? Because it doesn’t seem to have worked.

The Lockhorn, 12/6/22

You have to respect how big a production Leroy and Loretta make out of passive-aggressively trying to destroy each other emotionally, like with props and everything. That’s how they keep things fresh!

Mary Worth, 12/6/22

Look, I understand the dramatic reasons why we’re spending today’s strip on Iris’s inner monologue, but frankly I’m much more interested in finding out whether or not Nan is making airplane noises as she feeds Zak.