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Funky Winkerbean, 12/24/20

It’s Christmas Eve, everybody! What do you need to make your holiday complete? Is it the return of the storyline about Funky’s senile and sexually aggressive father?

Pardon My Planet, 12/24/20

Is it a vision of Santa and his elves, conducting unspeakable medical experiments on innocent people for no reason you can fathom?

Six Chix, 12/23/20

Wrong! What you need to make your holiday complete is this comic strip about a teddy bear yelling at a little girl that she needs to learn about self-soothing! Simultaneously baffling and repellent, it’s everything we love about this wonderful season. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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Six Chix, 12/16/20

It was just back in March of this year that there was a Rhymes With Orange strip about dogs pissing on sentient snowmen for which the syndicate colorist bravely held the line and refused to use yellow to highlight the clearly drawn section where the snowman got pissed on. But the last nine months have frankly felt like about a million years, and so now, in December, the colorists have clearly just given up. You wanna do a comic where a snowman tries to bargain with a dog to stop the pissing? Sure, whatever. Let’s make the piss the same color as the sunset, too, just really drive home the melange of beauty and disgust that we’re aiming for. It’s been a year, man, there’s no point in being precious about, well, anything. Also, fun fact, I at first misremembered the Rhymes With Orange strip linked above as a Six Chix strip, so I spent a lot of trime trying to find it in my Six Chix archives using keywords like “urine” and “piss” and “pee” and honestly I got a lot of results, so clearly I am, and always have been, Part Of The Problem.

Beetle Bailey, 12/16/20

No one would ever mistake Lt. Fuzz for a Jacobin; his only ideological orientation is towards his own advancement. But clearly he’s not moving up the ladder in the army’s current structure, so maybe he thinks that so long as he backs the guillotining of a few aristocrats he’ll have better luck with the French Revolutionary practice of officers being elected by their soldiers (he won’t).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/20

CALLING IT NOW: Buck has come down with just a touch of the ol’ diabeetus! In normal times, newspaper readers can handle exciting medical things happening to Buck, like him getting shot in the head with a nail gun. But in the midst of a global pandemic, and especially with Wilford Brimley’s tragic passing this year, we need the comfort of a diabeetus storyline, to anchor us emotionally.

Dennis the Menace, 12/16/20

“My goodness and badness exist in superposition in the same physical space, in defiance of the laws of physics! My mother cringes away from me whenever I approach in horror at the ontological whirlpool of virtue and vice that I have become!”

Hi and Lois, 12/16/20

Is someone laughing? Fooling around? Having fun? Well they won’t anymore, not after Lois gets to the bottom of this!

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Six Chix, 12/11/20

We’ve pretty well established at this point that the coloring of the non-Sunday strips as published online is not actually directed by the original artist, right? Because I am fascinated by what’s happening on the face of our depressed castaway here:

Computer … enhance:

It seems pretty clear that the beard is entirely drawn in by the colorist, yes? There are no solid lines that would define it in black and white. I’m not even wholly sure what the gender of this character was originally intended to be, but it seems like a colorist saw this and thought to themselves “People stranded on tiny cartoon desert islands with a couple random palm trees who have long hair also have scraggly beards! Please honor our most sacred traditions! I have to take matters into my own hands now!”

Funky Winkerbean, 12/11/20

Hey, remember how Les and his dead wife Lisa have a daughter, Summer, and also he has an alive wife who also has a daughter, Keisha, and they’ve been off at college together for a while? Well, they came home for the winter break and got seasonal jobs at the mall wrapping presents dressed as elves! What I like is that it’s only December 11th but the strip’s narrative has already jumped ahead to Christmas Eve. I assume the next two weeks are going to be a blow-by-blow of the kids’ next few hours, and we’ll see how frantic, angry holiday shoppers yelling at them will ruin their feelings about Christmas for the rest of their lives.