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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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Herb and Jamaal, 11/14/12

Jamaal mangles the ancient punchline, “… twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty”, and outs himself as an idiot.

Pluggers, 11/14/12

… b-but the joke is that Spaniel-man is spending exactly the same time looking for his glasses and wearing them. Right? Am I missing some subtlety here? Oh, wait — it’s Pluggers.

Phantom, 11/14/12

It’s time for Hide the Lion — and anybody can play! Hot Queen is ticked, and the mighty Llongo warriors look all mopey. Everything is proceeding as Pissy Elder has forseen.

Heathcliff, 11/14/12

Garfield is disgusting. Oh, wait, this is Heathcliff. Well, Garfield is disgusting too, but this is Heathcliff.

Apartment 3-G, 11/14/12

Hey, it’s Six Differences time again! Can you spot the changes Greg has made to Mrs. Bloom’s apartment? Moving the invisible piano doesn’t count. (Hint: he locked the Taser® up with the sex toys. Margo’s in for one hell of a night.)

Spider-Man, 11/14/12

Yes, Peter — Sherry would have dug Genghis Khan, and you would have dug out the yak wallow behind his yurt.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Shoe, 10/20/12

I have no information one way or another as to whether the art and writing in Shoe are done by different people who barely speak to each other, but it sure would explain a lot about this cartoon, in which a mild joke one step removed from the classic “seafood diet” gag is paired with a scene of spectacular gloom. “If you’re ‘watching’ what you eat, I guess we’ll need to schedule an eye exam, because you seem to be eating pretty poorly! Hahahaha! Get it, it’s a play on words! So, anyway, like I said earlier, you’re dying of colon cancer.”

Herb and Jamaal, 10/20/12

“Uh … hello, Michelle, this is Jamaal — I was wondering if you’d be interested in going on a date with me. Could you say that again? This comic has four panels so we need to pad things out a bit. Yeah, we could redraw them, but that’d be tons more work than it’s worth.”

Dennis the Menace, 10/20/12

“Yep, ‘prone to over-the-top, irrational violence when frustrated over trivial matters,’ that’s what they say about the Mitchell boys!”

Family Circus, 10/20/12

Billy has come to the conclusion that the only way out of the hellscape of institutionalized education is suicide.