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Folks … it’s your very first comment of the new year! Enjoy!

“Grandma holds her spoon the way Mary Worth holds a cell phone. That spoon is going to miss her entire face anyway, but at least the oatmeal won’t make any noise when is falls on her lap.” –BeetleBoy

Your runners up are also very funny!

“Wilbur’s expression in panel two doesn’t show that he is madly in love with Estelle so much as it shows that he has suddenly realized that, in the light of a full moon reflecting off the ocean, she looks like an enormous roast beef sandwich.” –seismic-2

“The characters are arranged in the order Rex loves them. He loves himself the most. Sorry, adopted blond kid.” –Joe Blevins

“Do you see the size of this ‘library?’ I got one book — Fanny Hill — and there’s a seven-year waiting list.” — Pozzo

“Or, as I prefer to call it, No-Tip Tuesday.” –TheDiva

“Excited for Wilbur to fall off the boat and wash up on a deserted island where his only companion is a volleyball he draws a face on and the volleyball also romantically rejects him.” –The Great Joe Bivins

“Me? Bet on my own games? Why that would be deeply unethical. Anyway, we had to cover the spread, and the over/under, and a side proposition bet about which team would commit more fouls, which is why I threw those elbows, but it’s all just fun and games. Anyway, I have to got to see my book … keeper about some things, and hide from a loan shark … gunman, a lone shark gunman, in a new game I just made up, so later, guys!” –Voshkod

“Keep in mind that Pam and Jeff aren’t watching Bridgerton, but A Bridgerton Too Far, which in the Funkyverse I can only presume is a similar show but instead of sex it’s people burning themselves alive for the pleasure of it.” –The Rambling Otter

“Intrigued by that little white jar in front. What do you figure that is? Lard? Like, dipping lard?” –pugfuggly

“[Extremely scientific voice] Shelf-stable, easily transportable foodstuffs provide a useful source of calories in remote, inaccessible areas where the economy is dependent on stolen chickens.” –pastordan

“You’re a plugger if you still receive print magazines. C’mon grandpa, it’s all about TokTuk now! [Disclaimer: I don’t actually know what it’s all about now.]” –GeoGreg

“We complain that these days our normal interactions with people are mediated by ‘therapy speak’, but back in the 1950s you could feel the thumb of Dr Freud on the scale.” –Ettorre

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Blondie, 1/7/22

If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you know that Elmo is one of my Blondie obsessions. Who is he? Where are his parents? Why does he spend so much time with Dagwood, an adult to whom he is unrelated? Well, a faithful reader recently sent me a report from her visit to the Library of Congress, where American tax dollars are (correctly) being used to maintain old Blondie strips that shed some light on the issue. Both Alexander and Cookie started out as babies in the strip before gradually aging up to teenagerhood and then staying there; as you can see in this strip from 1954, Elmo was originally introduced as a playmate/potential crush object for Cookie when they were about the same age.

Blondie, 7/21/54

Since Dagwood was originally concerned that Elmo would eventually steal Cookie away from his home, it’s particularly ironic that today Cookie and Alexander are usually off doing teenager things, leaving only eternally tween Elmo around to serve as Dagwood’s substitute child. However, as we can see in today’s strip, there are some family qualities that can never be replicated. Elmo is just brushing all those crumbs, which account for at least a dozen calories, onto the floor! A true Bumstead would just be hoovering them up into his insatiable maw. In the final panel of today’s strip, Dagwood grieves because no matter how much affection he has for Elmo, there will always be a gap between them.

(Meanwhile, the next to last panel of that 1954 strip reveals that, no matter what you think of the Bumstead living room arrangement that has Blondie perpetually sitting with her back to her husband, it’s at least an improvement over the previous scenario, in which she had to sit on the floor.)

Mary Worth, 1/7/22

One of my pet peeves is that so many media pundits are basically in the business of making short- or long-term predictions about what’s going to happen — in politics, the stock market, sports, whatever — but suffer almost no consequences when they are consistently and routinely wrong. Thus, in order to show my commitment to accountability, I want to acknowledge that while I predicted a couple days ago that Wilbur would do the Titanic “I’m the king of the world!” routine crying and alone, in fact he’ll be doing it alone and giggling and drunk, for about thirty to ninety seconds before he falls to his unmourned death.

Family Circus, 1/7/22

It’s Grandma’s facial expression here that really makes this panel for me. She just looks so happy! “Hell yeah,” she thinks, “this goop is gonna slide down my gullet in complete silence — just the way I like it.”

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Crankshaft, 1/6/22

I didn’t watch Netflix’s Bridgerton, but there was a brief window in late 2020 and early 2021 when online discourse about it was inescapable, and so I somewhat against my will became aware that a lot of the plot (which takes place in Regency England) revolves around a Duke insisting on using the withdrawal method of contraception with his young, sexually naive wife, and she slowly over the course of the show learns what semen is and why she’s not getting pregnant. What I’m saying is that the potential for classic Crankshaft wordplay here is absolutely horrifying, and Pam needs to put a stop to this is as soon as possible by throwing her television into the ocean.

Pluggers, 1/6/22

No. No. Absolutely not. This is the sort of thing a plugger would claim a little kid would do, because they spend all day on their iWhoosit or Android telephone or whatever. No self-identified plugger would admit to doing this. I refute this. I refute this.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/6/22

“Haw haw! We’re treatin’ our bodies like a garbage disposal! What d’we got to live for, anyway?”