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Well, kids, as happens every year, I’m about to depart for my annual multi-city Christmas travelganza. I will start posting again on January 2, or thereabouts! But, as has become my wont, I have some fun things to share with you before I sign off for the year.

First up is an awesomely ambitious offering from faithful reader commodorejohn! You may have heard some of this comics-themed music before; now he’s completed an entire concept album called The Funnies, the cover art to which I dearly hope he doesn’t mind that I reproduce here:

With song titles like “Mary Worth Told Me To,” “Bösendorfer Bop,” and “Rockin’ The Armory (Recorded live at the Bucket, August 4th, 2009.)”, how could you go wrong? And it’s downloadable for free! What are you waiting for?

Also! I got a note from faithful reader Kattack about a recent trip she took to Monterey, California, where she encountered a playground dedicated to Dennis the Menace. Here she is, high-fiving and frolicking with the cartoon scamp in an extremely non-menacing fashion:

As is generally the case, the missing menace was provided by raccoons, who have decided to blanket the park with their delicious-looking feces:

“I actually made my whole family go out of their way to find this park once I saw it on a map because I knew you would appreciate it,” Kattack says. “The raccoon shit sign was just a bonus.”

Also! We’ve all been watching in mingled horror and fascination as the Pearls Before Swine characters have, with apparent success, agitated for Ziggy to start wearing pants. But what if things had gone … the other way? The Jumble’s Jeff Knurek dares to visualize it!

And finally! Faithful reader Susan sent me some pics of one of her delightful finds: a Mark Trail coloring book!

Wait, who’s this little blonde girl? A friend for Rusty? Ha ha, just kidding, it’s well known that Rusty has no friends.

What says “good, wholesome fun for kids” more than the severed heads of their favorite comics characters surrounding a personal message from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior?

The most unsettling thing to me about this image is Mark and Rusty’s white hair. Kids, do you have an extremely black crayon? One that’s blacker than black? One that’s so black it appears to shine with its own dark, mysterious inner light?

Let me just step in here and say that you don’t own any of America, Rusty. It’s exactly this sort of commie “holding land in common” talk that led directly to Mark’s brutal assault on a duly appointed law enforcement officer.

And on that note, I leave you to your own holiday fun. See ya in 2010, everybody!

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Pearls Before Swine, 9/21/09

Pearls Before Swine parodies Apartment 3-G. Poor Margo.

Edge City, 9/21/09

Last holiday: avoid bread products. Next holiday: promote bread products. Religion is so complicated.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/09

For some real money, try ‘Pie-the-Author’: you can pick up cowpies free at any dairy farm.

Dick Tracy, 9/21/09

What? The clown? The one we saw with a blunderbuss back in July? Say it ain’t so!

Judge Parker, 9/21/09

OK blah blah blah Gloria Sanchez sure is hot blah blah blah blah. Got it.

Mark Trail, 9/21/09

Hey, if it’s a good idea to just leave him bob, put him in the water!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Pearls Before Swine, 8/12/09

Hello, anonymous rude denizens of the Internet! You have driven Stephan Pastis into his Internet Happy Box, so I hope you’re satisfied with yourselves. Actually, when people started emailing me about this strip this morning, I had a weird moment of déjà vu, as I thought this had run months ago. In fact, Stephan e-mailed it to me when he drew it, but that was back in April thanks to the high-tech distribution system that underlies the newspaper comics industry. Anyway, at the time I promised to rip him a new one when this came out, except he hasn’t been doing any of the terrible pun strips lately. SO UNTIL NEXT TIME PASTIS. You stay in that box just to be safe, though.

Baldo, 8/12/09

I went to college at Cornell, which is in the absolutely lovely (some might even say “gorges” HA IT’S A PUN GET IT) city of Ithaca, New York, which, despite being lovely, does not have much going for it in the way of malls. When you grow up going to Cheektowaga’s fabulous Walden Galleria, it’s a bit of a letdown doing all your enclosed chain-store shopping and food-court dining at the Pyramid Mall. This establishment appears to have since changed its name to “The Shops At Ithaca Mall,” which I find extremely amusing — oh, there are shops at the mall, you say? Anyway, I always used to mock the Pyramid Mall’s smallness by referring to it as the “Petite Mall”; I thought this was hilarious and everyone else was either more or less indifferent about it or thought it was actively offensive to people who have seizures. This is a roundabout way of saying that, why yes, I do feel validated by having essentially the same joke used in a Baldo strip 15 years later, thanks for asking!

I originally felt like there might be only about fifty-fifty chance that my terrible seizure joke was in fact the intended reading of this strip, but then I realized that there was no other obvious humor content here, so I figure that has to be what’s happening.

Hi and Lois, 8/12/09

It has not escaped my notice that quite a few of the recent Trixie-centered Hi and Lois strips have featured the pre-verbal infant girl wandering around outside apparently unattended. Maybe her parents are hoping that she’ll be adopted by a local wolfpack or some other band of animals and they’ll be relieved of responsibility for her; unfortunately, they hadn’t counted on the effectiveness with which the builders of their suburban subdivision cleared it of most wildlife. Trixie’s only option is to take up with a colony of frogs, which will go fine until she hits puberty and heads to the culvert under the arterial road with amplexus on her mind, only to be bitterly disappointed.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/12/09

Ha ha! He finds his wife’s mother so irritating that he’s going to hand her over to savages who will use her as a slave or a sacrifice to their pagan gods! MOTHERS IN LAW, am I right, people?