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Happy New Year, faithful readers! I have returned from my year’s end journey and am ready to amuse you once more with my comic-mocking wit, which I’ve been inflicting on you all for ten years now and which I’ll never stop ever, probably. As usual, I intended to take a break from the (electronic simulacrum of the) funny pages over vacation, but upon return felt compelled to catch up with my beloved soaps and some of the other strips, and have curated the best and dumbest here for you!

Dick Tracy, 12/25/14

In one of several plots I haven’t been keeping you updated on in Dick Tracy, Dick’s son Junior and his wife Sparkle Plenty are having a baby! Which was apparently delivered on Christmas Day, accompanied by a biblical quotation implying heavily that Dick’s new grandchild is the new Messiah, the Anointed One who will usher in God’s Kingdom on Earth. Will Dick resist the new divine order with all the violence at his disposal, or will he serve as the agent of his holy Descendent, mostly by shooting His or Her enemies?

Gil Thorp, 12/25/14

In a treasured Gil Thorp holiday tradition, Gil and Mimi pose for a Christmas picture that does not include the hideously ugly children they used to have.

Judge Parker, 12/25/14

Judge Parker wished us a Merry Christmas from the eerily empty Sonoron Desert, which, with any luck, our heroes’ RV will soon wander into, only to break down again, leaving them exposed to the elements.

Apartment 3-G, 12/25/14

On Christmas Day, Margo showed the true holiday spirit: she knows there’s no greater gift a boss can give her harried and almost certainly underpaid employee than to allow him to buy her dinner.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/26/14

“Either way, it’s definitely going to be your fault when I relapse! Aren’t you glad you came back?”

Mary Worth, 12/26/14

Mary Worth’s promotion of a healthy and active sexual lifestyle for seniors has now dovetailed with its firm belief in filial piety. Remember, it’s acceptable for a mother to cockblock her daughter, but not vice-versa.

(Also, psst, speaking of Mary Worth, faithful reader Wanders’s Mary Worth And Me blog is hosting the Annual Worthy Awards! Go over and vote!)

Mark Trail, 12/26/14

Wait, Mitchum, didn’t you hire local thugs in order to keep your fingerprints (both metaphorical and literal) off of this brutal crime you have planned? And here you are showing your face to your victims! Whatever you do, don’t explain to everyone who you are and why you’re doing this!

Mark Trail, 12/27/14

God damn it, Mitchum.

Curtis, 12/29/14

Traditionally, this time of year Curtis graces us with a nutty Kwanzaa storyline, featuring things like bat-winged bears and giant telepathic otters and adorable tiny primates stabbing witches in the neck. Unfortunately, this year in lieu of such delightful madness, we are instead getting days and days of Curtis’s dad sitting on the couch and kvetching about how Kwanzaa is getting so commercialized these days, which, in addition to being super boring, is, I’m reasonably sure, not even remotely true.

Mark Trail, 12/30/14

I guess Mitchum and his thugs are wearing matching shirts as a sort of Eco-Terrorism False Flag Uniform, but for a brief moment I had hoped that, upon deciding to punch Mark, Mitchum’s hair peeled off the top of his head to form the bald-ponytail combo in panel three — that his decision to assault our hero had in other words caused him to literally flip his lid.

Apartment 3-G, 1/1/15

Margo Magee’s management secrets … revealed!!!

Mary Worth, 1/2/15

Welp, it looks like Hanna and Amy aren’t so apocalyptically angry at each other anymore, and Hanna is using her powers of witchcraft to summon up an image of her new boyfriend for her daughter to admire. Meanwhile, though, Gordon has been reunited with his true love, the television set.

And I have returned to my true love: entertaining all of you! Normal-style comics blogging resumes tomorrow! Happy 2015, and may God have mercy on our souls!

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Mary Worth, 12/21/14

This has definitely been the year of reckless sexuality in Mary Worth, as this is actually the second time in 2014 that Anaïs Nin has been quoted in the opening panel of a Sunday strip. The eroticism in today’s strip is much more blatant, though. Look at Hanna and Sean in that last panel! Their bodies are definitely melting into each other, I tell you what.

Archie, 12/21/14

It’s not unusual for a teen boy to imagine the two girls he’s fixated on looking at each other in sexually charged surprise, as if they’re seeing each other with new eyes. Usually in that scenario they aren’t wearing bulky Santa suits, but who am I to yuck someone else’s yum?

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Gil Thorp, 12/19/14

There’s a great Gil Thorp plot storytelling tradition that’s been ignored for the past few plots, in which random non-Gil, non-Kaz people end up taking over coaching duties, allowing our heroes to do even less work than usual. It’s been so long since we’ve seen this that I’m down with seeing it play out in this case, even though Robert “Bobby” Howry is the team manager and thus on the border of being an official coach! He’s also on the border of several potential DSM-IV diagnoses, if his obsessive nickname fixation is any indication.

Mary Worth, 12/19/14

Oh, man, Hanna’s glare is just lasering into the side of Sean’s head in panel two! He’s not interested in a private two-person flute concert at all; he wants to assemble an cultish harem of sexy ladies of a certain age. Somerset? More like Allareset, as in all the women who live there are set up as Sean’s sex thralls, amiright?

Funky Winkerbean, 12/19/14

Oh, look, Funky has one of those “smart” phones, as in it’s smart enough to know that any email from a doctor has grim plot significance and needs to be put in a larger font than an email from a wife or a loved one or whatever. The good (?) news is that Dr. C. Hill wasn’t the one who picked up Funky’s prostate cancer, so maybe this is just about his impending heart attack. It sure must be “chill” being a doctor in the Funkyverse, in the sense that your soul is icy and numb after years of constant failure to keep your patients out of death’s clutches!