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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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Shoe, 11/25/12

Since the early days of this blog, I have been complaining that the bird-people of Shoe refuse to fully acknowledge their avian natures. Today is a prominent example, in which two barfly bird-men (barbirds?) talk about birds that are hunted for sport, and then imagine a crazy, impossible world in which they were hunted, as if they weren’t birds, as if they weren’t delicious, as if their plumage wouldn’t look beautiful when draped over a taxidermy form. No, instead, the Perfesser just cracks wise about how at last call all the hot fellas are hunted, by the sexually voracious ladies, which, I hate to break it to you guys, but the lights are up and you two are the only ones in there, and nobody seems to be hunting you, for sex.

Panels from the Better Half, 11/25/12

Your Uncle Lumpy has got me reading the Better Half, of all things, and I have to say that it’s … mildly interesting? It’s sort of like a distant relative of the Lockhorns, except instead of regarding each other with murderous contempt, Harriet and Stanley seem genuinely in love but also somewhat baffled by each other, and indeed by the world at large. Nothing in the gentle marital foible-themed cartoons I’d read up till today had prepared me for this nightmare, of course. Stanley’s enthusiasm over the fact that his corpse will someday break down to its organic components (if the flesh isn’t first torn off by scavengers) can be written off as eccentric, if unsettling; but once we see him rambling angrily about about great heaps of discarded, beautiful human faces mouldering in dumpsters all over Hollywood, we know that something very, very wrong is going on inside his tiny cranium.

Family Circus, 11/25/12

The innumerable dead are not thankful for much, but they are thankful for this: they have been spared knowledge of Jeffy.

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Marvin, 11/15/12

Mary Worth, 11/15/12

Family Circus, 11/15/12

Spider-Man, 11/15/12

Lockhorns, 11/15/12

Scabs, again?

Oh God I am so profoundly sorry.

— Uncle Lumpy