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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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Heathcliff, 11/23/12

Newspaper comics are an incredibly conservative art form — not in a political sense, necessarily, but in the sense that visual signifiers and little building blocks of jokes that haven’t existed in the real world for literally years are still just taken for granted in comics, because they’ve become established running gags during the strips’ decades-long run. Take, for instance, the idea that you’d put your cat or dog out at night. This was, I guess, an unremarkable aspect of pet ownership at one point; but today, anyone living in an urban or suburban area would be judged rather harshly if they just let the dog roam free at night, and while plenty of people do have indoor-outdoor cats, even in the city, plenty don’t, and those that do almost never actively kick the cat out at night. This change in attitude happened long enough ago that, when I was a child in the early ’80s, I had to have my mom explain to me why Fred Flintstone dropped Dino on his front step in the opening sequence of the Flintstones; yet here we are 30 years later, and Heathcliff is still being comically bounced across the lawn, and Dagwood’s suburban cul de sac is haunted by packs of feral dogs at night.

Wizard of Id, 11/23/12

Meanwhile, newspaper comics are apparently forbidden to use the word “hell,” even when it’s the name of a place of afterlife punishment rather than a curse word. There are probably plenty of other perfectly understandable substitutes that could have been used instead (“Hades,” “The underworld”, etc.), but heck, let’s go with “heck,” a euphemism for the swear word that’s never, ever used to refer to hell-as-a-place, just to confuse and irritate everybody.

Apartment 3-G, 11/23/12

Haha, wait, what? Greg is the new James Bond? Is he even English? Is he even attractive? Wouldn’t he be able to afford a better apartment than a third-floor walkup in a building where teachers and nurses live? I guess this does at least explain why Margo hasn’t been putting any effort into publicity, because having the new Bond in your stable of clients is probably a license to print money, assuming that the film doesn’t flop because it turns out its new star is a bland American who goes around wearing sky-blue turtlenecks.

Meanwhile, Skyler is the victim of a abrupt hair color shift, but as a young Hollywood starlet this is actually one of the more realistic instances of this typically A3Gian blip.

Gil Thorp, 11/23/12

Gil Thorp’s storyline continues to be not even interesting enough for me to bother summarizing for you, but in the interest in keeping you up to date on what’s really important, here is a sexy closeup on Gil’s sweaty face!

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Mark Trail, 11/20/12

Mark’s remarkably non-traumatizing kidnap idyl is still continuing apace, as the good people of Not Guerilla Island prepare to make a scurmptious feast from the fish Mark and Pop caught, and … say, what’s the story with that little guy in the white shirt in the second panel?

OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHAT’S GOING ON WITH HIS TONGUE? It’s not … human. Sure, you could try to claim that it’s just a weird little semi-circle crudely drawn onto a pre-existing clip art face, but I think the safe bet is that this child is an alien lizard-man wearing a meat-sack disguise, just like everyone else on the island, and once they get enough ransom money to repair their spacecraft, they’ll swarm all over Mark and Andy, their razor-sharp teeth tearing away all their flesh in minutes, leaving bleached skeletons behind.

Hi and Lois, 11/20/12

I’m not sure how we’re supposed to parse the politics here — are we intended to be patriotically enraged by cheap Chinese labor, or are the industrious low-wage workers of Shenzhen’s factories supposed to compare favorably to the smug American repairman? I do know that this is a strip that has never exactly focused on little visual details, which makes the lovingly rendered stitching on the repairman’s visible underpants all the more unsettling.

Heathcliff, 11/20/12

I’m certainly not opposed to Heathcliff being called to account for his many crimes in a court of law, but I do have some questions about the fish that the guy next to him is holding. Specifically: what’s the deal with the fish? Is it evidence in one of the many cases about to be tried simultaneously? Is it bait? Was Heathcliff, the master criminal, lured into the Man’s courtroom by some guy waving a delicious, pungent dead fish around? Because that would be kind of disappointing.

Gasoline Alley, 11/20/12

Here are some characters in Gasoline Alley! I guess you’re supposed to like them, even though their black, beady, inhuman eyes are the stuff of your most terrifying nightmares.