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Dick Tracy, 12/10/21

Ever since the raid on Apparatus HQ, Dick’s been hard at work down in the phrenology lab, trying to determine if the Ace of Spades’s gimp mask concealed a sloping Italianate brow, or, worse, the lantern jaw of an Irishman.

Blondie, 12/10/21

[adds “nice, plump gobbler combo” to the list of phrases that if I encounter them again I will immediately call the police]

Mary Worth, 12/10/21

God damn it, if this isn’t some kind of Wilbur fantasty sequence I am calling on all Comics Curmudgeon readers to immediately riot in the streets!!!! THEY CAN’T GET AWAY WITH THIS

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/10/21

She … she called the news hotline and told them all about it? Try to keep up, kid.

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Hagar the Horrible, 12/5/21

Yet another example of why the so-called “throwaway” panels at the top of a Sunday strip, which are excised in some paper layouts and thus need to include a standalone joke, are so important to the overall vibe. When you know that getting cucked by a court jester is one of Hagar’s literal nightmares, this incident at the tavern takes on a much darker tone.

Family Circus, 12/5/21

Remember, folks, old people are an endless reservoir of knowledge, and there are three distinct ways their pearls of wisdom can be passed on: they can say it to you directly, they can deliver it to an unseen audience while you’re in the background, or they can tell it to a little kid who then immediately goes and reports it to you in the next room. We hope this cartoon has helped bridge the “generation gap.”

Mary Worth, 12/5/21

MEANWHILE … Wilbur has given his fish gender-reversed versions of his and Estelle’s names? Oh no. Oh no.

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Mary Worth, 12/4/21

Look, Wilbur, they’re fish. They’re fish! They’re fine, but the gulf between their world and a human’s is much wider than between, say, a human and a cat or dog, and no real emotional bond is going to arise. So you see, she can never love them like she loved y– ohhh, I get it now.

Gil Thorp, 12/4/21

Gotta admit that I’m kind of enjoying how this Gil Thorp storyline is wrapping up: will all the teen characters just shouting the things they’ve learned (?) over the course of the fall at each other at a rapid clip while standing on furniture. Have you kids all internalized these little life lessons? No? Too bad, basketball starts next week!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/4/21

The Hootin’ Holler setting of this strip has always been one created by and for flatlanders to play around with a very specific set of stereotypes about hillbilles, which has been going on for as long as anyone reading this has been alive, so at some level it’s kind of instructive to read it as “what do people living in mainstream America think life is like in Appalachia, or possibly what life was like in Appalachia during the Great Depression?” Anyway, the answer provided by today’s strip is “Well, there’s big piles of animal shit everywhere, but the native peoples have made an alliance with the amphibian world to help mitigate the negative side effects.”

Shoe, 12/4/21

“Yes, you read that right: the cast members gave birth on stage, only for their newly laid eggs to be cracked open, cooked, and devoured to the horror of the audience. We’re birds, remember? Birds! Also, this newspaper only has two employees, so we’re a little loose about what goes into our sensationalist crime coverage and what goes into theater reviews.”