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Folks, I’ll be taking my traditional long winter’s nap next week, but there are still a couple day’s worth of comics in the hopper that you’ll get enjoy this weekend. For now, though, here’s your last comment of the week of 2023, so behold its glory!

“All this, and we still don’t know who Brad is. Sonia’s boyfriend? Kitty’s boyfriend? Sonia’s father? Kitty’s father? I’m betting he’s the sales rep from meatless ‘BLUFF’© burgers, making his commission one dysfunctional household at a time.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

O come let us adore these wonderful runners up!

“Marvin branches out into a new form of dumping.” –nescio

“In Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!, ‘soylent steaks’ referred to meat substitutes made from soy and lentils — a perfectly respectable veggie burger. But the film adaptation punched it up into the titular Soylent Green, which famously is people. Then the techbro decided to name his food substitute after the best known popular representation of cannibalism, and now we’re full circle, with something that probably is soy and lentils filtered through layers of signification. Semiotics in Mary Worth isn’t just calling a guy ‘Hillend’ because his butt is the size of a natural formation!” –matt w

“Who dresses their toddler like this? Is Marvin going to see Santa or going to a wedding?” –ectojazzmage

“Whether or not an adult camel is smarter than a human boy, he’s smart enough fashion-wise to be wearing the service hat of what appears to be … a train conductor? For sanity’s sake, I’ll assume he took it off the desiccated corpse of the real conductor whose body still lies alongside a forgotten railway car half buried in the desert sand.” –Hibbleton

“Well, Dennis, I actually have a CDL and a private pilot license issued by the FAA — that covers the US, of course. Now, for the EU, I have separate licensing for both activities but, since Brexit, they’re not valid in the UK, so that required additional bureaucracy. Now Russia, well, Santa had to pay out a pretty penny to get the right people to sign the right paperwork, and then I had to get the sleigh’s IFF transponder cleared by both Russian and Ukrainian forces … [thirty minutes later] … and finally, I got a Civil Aviation Safety Authority certificate in Australia! Does that answer your question?” –Voshkod

“Have you every considered that what you thought of as a normal and functional part of your anatomy was actually a swollen, puss-filled cyst? Merry Christmas, and body horror to all!” –Stuart F

“Billy’s previous two letters read ‘Santa, pay attention to my third letter but not to this one’ and ‘Santa, pay attention to any letter that does not ask you to pay attention to it’. He’s hoping he can cause Santa to experience a logical paradox and go down in history as the boy who ruined Christmas for everyone.” –Schroduck

“Shoe is simply telling Roz that as long as she serves bird meat to her costumers, the charges of cannibalism will not stick, because the evidence is digested. Freezing the meals will only produce long-lasting incriminating evidence.” –Ettorre

“Poor Shoe. He was just trying to not tell Roz that she’s stupid if she thinks she could start a small business that could even begin to compete for shelf space already dominated by multi-national conglomerates but isn’t bright enough himself to do it in any way other than insulting her cooking. Roz, you’re already in a losing battle against chain restaurants. Looks at all those empty stools.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Rene is the sort to have news alerts with his name (and various aliases) delivered to his smartphone. Relying on broadcast news isn’t how he got this far ahead.” –Philip

“Dick Tracy took this job for two reasons: to shoot people with impunity, and to be smug in his moral superiority over others. And if he can’t have the former, by GOD will he indulge in the latter.” –TheDiva

“The next time I’m interrogated by the police, I’ll make sure to wear a sweet Criterion Channel branded polo shirt. Cops can’t lock you up if they see your devotion to Cinema.” –lorne

“He didn’t skip out on you, Mud. He calmly walked to an Uber with dignity, a suitcase of money, and whatever wasn’t nailed down, then rode to the airport.” –Old Man Shadow

“If a plugger slips and falls on the ice and no one is around to hear, will he make a sound? Yes, he’ll make a sound about the fall with his friends at the diner for the next decade or until full dementia kicks in.” –Baja Gaijin

“‘Cloudy, not bright’ is a phrase that seemed familiar to me but I couldn’t place it, so I googled it. Turns out that the top hits were all clues from holiday crosswords. Anyhow, just loving the idea of Gregg Walker sipping tea by a fire, looking over a newspaper, when it suddenly dawns on him that he was supposed draw a comic. He quickly scans the clues until he falls on that one, and writes ‘+ SARGE VIOLENCE’ on it in blue ink, takes another sip of tea, and turns over to the sports section.” –pugfuggly

“Looks like the Hi and Lois visual content assembly team didn’t have a baby stroller in their clip-art file. Instead, they had assets for a handtruck and a high chair, and only five minutes before they had to leave for their league bowling match.” –jroggs

“Remember, the plugger himself is there to hear the gunshot-like sound of his femur breaking.” –lynn

“About damn time that we saw a woman who wanted Santa to satisfy her burning womanly needs. Normally we just see flirting with the ulterior motive of getting sables and convertibles.” –Tonio

“When Brad finally does lose the hat, the extent of his male pattern baldness will shock us all. Say what you will about Keith’s politics, but his red-blooded all-American crew cut will stand proud and strong forever!” –BigTed

“At her age, her likes and dislikes change at the drop of a hat. Yes, all Sonia really needs is to replace Brad with a nice, sensible young man whose interests and attitudes she’ll adopt as her own in a totally appropriate, mentally healthy way! Let’s see who the available male options are in Mary Worth-land. Well, there’s Tommy. Um, let’s move on. And isn’t Dr. Drew taken nowadays? Sorry Sonia, looks like it’s Wilbur for you!” –Thelonious_Nick

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Gasoline Alley, 12/22/23

OK, I may have to revise my previous statement of approval for Gasoline Alley’s wild, no-rules approach to the mall Santa game. Folks, the men (and occasional women) who put on the red suit and the fake beard are just doing their jobs, part of which involves the emotional labor of making everyone feel welcome and seen; do not take their openness towards you as an invitation to live out your longstanding sexual fantasy of making it with a thousand-year-old elf/nature spirit.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/22/23

If you need more proof that Parson Tuttle is a theologically unlearned fraud, consider the fact that anyone who decided that a lone cow was a perfectly acceptable substitute for a nativity scene probably hasn’t read Exodus 32.

Dennis the Menace, 12/22/23

You know I’m on a big kick lately about how the Lockhorns are millennials, but the truth is that today millennials are between 27 and 42, so probably most adult legacy comics characters, especially those with younger kids, are millennials. Anyway, Alice mostly ignoring her son’s Christmas-related whining by idly scrolling on her phone is a particularly millennial way to turn the menacing tables on him, in my opinion.

Mary Worth, 12/22/23

Sorry to obsess about Brad’s hat, but I’m clearly not the only one! Would he be less insufferable if he dropped the hat and let his hair free like God intended? Maybe! He could at least try it!

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Blondie, 12/21/23

Huh, well, I guess “Josh uses his dumb blog about comic strips to talk about the infancy narratives in the Bible” year had to come around eventually, and it looks like 2023 is the year! Anyway, a fun fact about the infancy narratives, plural, is that there are two of them, one in the Gospel of Matthew and the other the Gospel of Luke (John and Mark just jump right into Jesus’s baptism and ministry), and they are almost completely different from one another, beyond the basics of the virgin birth happening in Bethlehem. Matthew (and only Matthew) has the killing of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt; there’s no indication in that story that Mary and Joseph aren’t already living in Bethlehem, and it’s explicitly stated that they end up in Nazareth to get away from King Herod’s son and successor. Only Luke has the stuff about Mary and John the Baptist’s mother being cousins, and only Luke has the story about the census bringing the family to Bethlehem and Mary giving birth; afterwards they go home (to Nazareth, in this version) and there’s no mention of Egypt at all.

But because both these stories were canonized, most people have an idea of the infancy narrative that basically just mashes all these incidents together into one sequence. Even the colorful characters that appear together in manger scenes are actually from two completely different stories: the wise men, guided by a star, are in Matthew, while the shepherds, summoned by an angel, are in Luke. This is a long way to get to my point, which is: A GPS joke would’ve worked better with wise men rather than shepherds, right? Like, I guess technically they’re coming in from the fields, but Bethlehem was a pretty small city back then, and the wise men are coming from a completely different country. Frankly, I think whoever wrote this joke is kind of mixing the shepherds and the wise men up, so — and here’s a sentence that I’m frankly proud could be found nowhere else but on Josh reads dot com, your source for newspaper comics and musings on the textual history of Christianity — I firmly believe that today’s Blondie really demonstrates the complex ways that these two contradictory narratives have become a single story in our collective mindset.

Beetle Bailey, 12/21/23

Beetle Bailey is frankly almost as old as the Bible, and its devoted readers have internalized its logic as dogma, so I guess it can get away with doing a strip where Beetle’s like “What if it’s not sunny tomorrow” and then Sarge says “Then I’m going to beat you into unconsciousness.” Doesn’t make it right, though! Doesn’t make it right.

Hi and Lois, 12/21/23

This year, Hi and Lois is letting us know about the real meaning of Christmas: being stiffed by retailers and your boss, and then forcing yourself to attend social obligations with people you hate. I do think that Hi and Thirsty genuinely like each other, or at least have trauma bonded at their job, but you have to admit it’d be pretty funny if the whole gang were saying all this while heading over to the Thurstons, their neighbors and also two of the few people we ever see them interacting with socially.

Pluggers, 12/21/23

If a plugger slips and falls on the ice, and no one is around to hear, because he’s alienated his family with his unhinged Facebook posts and his neighbors with his extremely bad vibes, and then he slowly freezes to death out there, taking his final breath on Christmas morning, vaguely hearing happier people laughing and enjoying each other’s company … wait, what was the question again? Anyway, pluggers, please salt your front walk, I’m begging you.