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I hope everyone had a fantastic conclusion to 2018! I had a blast, and even though Curtis seems to have permanently eschewed its traditional Kwanzaa madness, I managed to select some choice continuity strips for the past week and change for you so you can start your year off right.

Mark Trail, 12/22/18

Oh, hey, Rusty and Mara’s plan to track … this …….. bad? …….. guy with their phones finally seems to have paid off! He’s mad about being caught, of course, but he’s probably even angrier that Rusty has a close relationship with a loving family who actually pick up the phone and call him every once in a while. Look, buddy, Rusty, a hideously boy-thing who was “adopted” under the extremely loose rules of Forest Law when Mark and Cherry started feeding him inside the house, wasn’t allowed to start calling them “dad” and “mom” until a tree fell on Mark, so you should really ask yourself how committed you are to family intimacy if you want to go further down this road.

Mary Worth, 12/22/18

Toby’s current suspicion level that anyone, anywhere might be sexually attracted to her husband: currently hovering around -1.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/23/18

Rex Morgan dips into the strip’s history to remember when June almost despaired that, despite our annual celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, mankind is still torn asunder by violence and conflict, while Rex suggets that maybe our bold exploration of space will finally pull all of humanity together in one common mission. Then we jump to the present day, in which not only are we still fighting a bunch of wars, but we’re also lying to each other about our supposedly heroic wartime deeds! Oh, also, we went to the moon like five times in three years and then just kind of stopped.

Mary Worth, 12/23/18

Ian’s current suspicion level that anyone, anywhere might be sexually attracted to him: he reacts to a student gushingly complimenting his speaking voice not by thinking “Professor Cameron, you’ve still got it” but by considering supplementing his job as a low-level academic by dabbling in community theater.

Dick Tracy, 12/24/18

Hey, remember back in 2014 when those two bad guys stole one of Diet Smith’s Space Coupes but didn’t know how to control it and so they suffocated to death as they headed out into deep space? Well, their corpses, presumably perfectly preserved in the airless interior of the runaway spacecraft, wish you a very Merry Christmas!

Mary Worth, 12/24/18

Toby’s current suspicion level that anyone, anywhere might be sexually attracted to her husband: just actively cruel now.

Gil Thorp, 12/25/18

This is your annual reminder that Gil and Mimi used to have kids who appeared on their Christmas card with them, but they vanished from the strip without a trace years ago, and now they do a joint Christmas card with Kelly and Coach Kaz, which means we’re only like one or two years away from all of them just being open about being in a group polyamorous relationship.

Crankshaft, 12/25/18

One of Crankshaft’s favorite Christmas jokes is when Crankshaft “has too many rum balls” and “falls asleep,” which of course is totally family friendly and different from “drinks too much rum” and “passes out.” Anyway, you know what would be a good joke, would be if Jeff said “He certainly brings new meaning to ‘dead drunk’!” because it turned out Crankshaft died, from too much booze.

Gil Thorp, 12/26/18

Just a reminder that this Gil Thorp‘s basketball season B-plot is that one of the characters loves to quote the beloved Ashton Kutcher sitcom That ’70s Show. Don’t worry if you forget, though, because the other characters will remind you that that’s what’s going on!

Mark Trail, 12/27/18

Folks, let this be a lesson to you: if you let vital public services like public libraries fall into disrepair and disuse, then your community will inevitably be afflicted by blight like artifact-napping crime! Be warned and vote yes on library bonds in your town!

Dick Tracy, 12/27/18

Just a reminder that the current Dick Tracy plot involves a villain named Splitface, but he used to be named Haf and Haf, and there was another villain in this strip who was also named Splitface, but rest assured that they’re different people. Will the narrative payoff be worth the confusion for the approximately 15 people who care about this stuff? Based on everything we know about Dick Tracy, obviously yes!

Mark Trail, 12/28/18

Oh, thank God, Jose is in fact definitively a good guy! I certainly hope every other character in this plotline gets a strip to explain their alignment and motivations by the time the whole thing wraps up sometime in 2023.

Dick Tracy, 12/29/18

Just a reminder that the current Dick Tracy plot involves a villain named Splitface, but there used to be another Splitface, and they’re not the same, see? Do we need to explain this every other day? Because we will, don’t think we won’t. Anyway, the current Splitface is called that because half his face is normal and half is terribly deformed, and Batman got to the name “Two-Face” first. The first Splitface was called that because, uh, he used to split people’s face with a knife, apparently.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/30/18

Were you thinking of sleeping in like some kind of damn hippie artist, Sarah? We didn’t arrange for you to have the extremely specific kind of amnesia where you forget your painting skills for you to relax on a national holiday like some kind of bum, young lady!

Mary Worth, 12/31/18

Ha ha, Toby uses “old man” as a jokey synonym for “husband,” just like people in the ’60s and ’70s did! This definitely establishes her as the younger one in this relationship.

Gasoline Alley, 1/1/19

It’s 2019, everybody! Get ready to spend the year contemplating this image of Walt, with one frame of his glasses a disc of pure white and the other filled with a disturbing expanse of flesh.

Judge Parker, 1/1/19

Time for a new adventure in Judge Parker! Marie’s new husband is missing — and he’s naked!

Gil Thorp, 1/2/19

Ha ha, things are really heating in Gil Thorp! Looks like a certain young man is about to learn that infringing on the rights of the Carsey-Werner Company, which controls all intellectual property associated with That ’70s Show, is no laughing matter!

Anyway, daily comics recaps begin anew tomorrow, so I’m signing off by sharing my New Year’s resolution with you: to continue to create a hilarious internet blog about daily comic strips. That’s my resolution every year, and guess what: every year I deliver! So buckle up!

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Mary Worth, 12/17/18

You know what we haven’t had in a while is a good Ian-Toby story! Pretty sure we haven’t checked in with their marriage since that time Ian made Toby pretend to cook dinner for his boss while she was trying to work on her art show so she briefly left him and had to lay low at Mary’s until Mary got tired of that and convinced her to go back. Anyway, today we’re learning how Toby has learned to describe her passionless marriage in a socially acceptable way, so I assume this storyline is going to be about some hot thing tempting her to stray, ultimately without success. On the other hand, the final panel implies that maybe it’ll be about how she killed him and made clothes out of his thick, lustrous pelt.

Gil Thorp, 12/17/18

Well, it’s another cinematic shot from above, and at least Mike Filion doesn’t look like a warped homunculus, but I’m having a hard time parsing what emotion we’re supposed to be reading from him here. Regret, at not getting to see Soto “pound” those banana splits? Relief, at getting away from the other players? Sleepiness? Is he just asleep?

Mark Trail, 12/17/18

Urgh, are these guys on a different team from Becky or what? Nngghgggngh, when is Mark gonna punch somebody?

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Dick Tracy, 12/15/18

Oh, hey, we’re back to the plot about Vitamin Flintheart and his heavily pregnant bride-to-be. In today’s installment, a stagehand at the play Vitamin is in (where he’s playing himself, natch, this is a strip that never misses a chance to collapse into meta-narrative in an attempt to impress you with how famous its characters are), makes a crass advance on Kandikane, leading Vitamin to loom over him with implied violence. In case you were tired of the extremely not sexy storyline about faxing and invoices, he’s a storyline that’s extremely not sexy but in, like, an entirely different way.

Gil Thorp, 12/15/18

Oh wow, I know panel one is supposed be a “cinematic,” foreshortened look down on our mysterious billboard renter, but it … doesn’t really work well, at all. He looks like a gibbon. A gibbon in glasses. It’s bad, man. Somebody should’ve stopped this.

Also, since the question is “Is Mediocre Good Enough,” to really knock ’em over with the answer, the answer has to be “yes!” Which will allow Gil and this year’s wacky crew of basketball players (seen in panel two engaging in extremely inscrutable antics) to muddle through yet another .550 season unmolested.

Six Chix, 12/15/18

The point of a strip like this is to contrast the wholesome book-acquisition in panel two with what we initially assumed to be her much darker quest, but I’m not really buying it. C’mon lady, you gotta sell it. What are you willing to do to get what you need? Are you willing to kill?