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Beetle Bailey, 1/17/15

Hey, it’s my favorite Beetle Bailey running gag, The Halftracks Hate Each Other With An Awful Intensity That Makes The Lockhorns Look Like A Nicholas Sparks Novel! Like many awful things in the comics, I originally “liked” this ironically but have come over the years to respect its terrible purity. Anyway, today General Halftrack tells the woman he’s been married to for decades that he has very little idea how to love a woman, but he’s quite sure that women are incapable of loving him or anyone else back.

Family Circus, 1/17/15

BuzzFeed, like all other secular entertainment, is forbidden within the walls of the Keane Kompound, and so Billy has been forced to cobble his own version together from available materials.

Pluggers, 1/17/15

Say what you will about pluggers, but they can promise you this: they will never, ever subject you to the sight of their nipples on national television.

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Family Circus, 12/18/14

There’s a lot of things about this world that Billy doesn’t understand, because he’s too young or naive or aggressively ignorant, and one of them is, to quote Matthew McConaughey’s character in True Detective, that time is a flat circle. Billy still sees this Christmas season of forced morality in a linear fashion, as an obstacle to be overcome and then forgotten about. Jeffy wears a look of world-weariness that indicates that despite being younger he is the wiser sibling. There’s no end in sight. Santa is always coming again, sometime in the future, and is always watching, always weighing us against his system of mysterious and arbitrary ethics. All of us have to be good, forever.

Mary Worth, 12/18/14

Look, Mary, Hanna appreciates how you’ve helped bring her and Sean together, but she is not interested in you listening in on their duet, OK? It’s for Hanna’s pleasure, not yours. It’s for fun. She’s uncomfortable performing for third parties. Maybe someday, but for now, all her flute-playing will be happening behind closed doors.

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Gil Thorp, 12/15/14

Guys, the Mudlarks have won its first state championship in years, so I guess it’s OK if we let the strip revel in it for another week or so instead of moving along to basketball season or whatever’s next. We may not have actually gotten to see Gil and Kaz triumphantly driving their banged up late-’90s Nissans behind the Milford Fire Departments most expendable vehicles, but at least we’re being treated to a long, hard look at the incredibly phallic state championship trophy. Go ahead, nameless Milford students! Stroke the trophy’s golden shaft, from its bulbous football-head down to its helmet-balls! You know you want to!

(If you’d like to celebrate the Mudlark’s championship season in style, the cool kids at the This Week In Milford blog have a t-shirt you might be interested in!)

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/15/14

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that nobody involved in the current iteration of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (or, for that matter, any of the previous iterations) actually lives in an isolated, impoverished hamlet in the Appalachians and/or Ozarks. So strips like today are interesting because I guess they’re supposed to represent what a flatlander would think a hillbilly’s idea of a flatlander would look like? Backpacks are the key, apparently. Anyway, these effete poverty tourists are looking pretty smug for people who are about to get murdered.

Family Circus, 12/15/14

Oh, man, there are so many great things about this Family Circus. There’s Billy’s look of shame and fear as he realizes that his usual goof-off attitude towards life and school assignments has finally resulted in something unpleasant happening to him, and his teacher’s similarly stricken appearance as she realizes the magnitude of her mistake in giving her most sullen student stage time. Then there’s the way Big Daddy Keane stares blankly at his failing son, while his wife glares at him, thinking “I’m going to go ahead and blame you for this.” But the best, the absolute best, is little Jeffy pointing and grinning, as if to say “Look! I’m not the one fucking up, for once!”

Crankshaft, 12/15/14

Crankshaft isn’t what you’d call sentimental, but he knows one thing for sure: if you don’t lure a white-bearded drifter to your home with the promise of a hot meal and then force him to wear a dirty old Santa suit and stand on your lawn for the entire month of December, it’s not really Christmas.