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Yippee! It’s this week’s top comment!

“Snuffy is freaking out because he’s severely allergic to peanuts. Is this an innocent mistake on Sheriff Tait’s part, or has he decided to rid himself of the Holler’s peskiest outlaw once and for all? Either way, I can’t wait to find out how this strip spells ‘anaphylactic shock.’” –Mr. A

Woo-hoo! It’s the hilarious runners up!

“I assumed ‘cheesecake‘ was a term of endearment until I remembered this is Dick Tracy. Not only is Cheesecake her actual name, she’s also wearing graham-cracker shoes.” –Peanut Gallery

“Does any anywhere still say ‘hey, gang’? That line is actually required to be followed with ‘let’s put on a show! My uncle has a barn.’” –Everything Is Better With Monkeys

“Love is like a faucet. It starts out nice and shiny but you do have to scrub it once a week so it doesn’t become gross, unless you buy one of those nice matte-finish ones. Sometimes you have to call the plumber and then it gets really, really expensive, for even the commodity parts, like a gasket that you could buy at the hardware store for ten cents. But when it’s working right, the warm fluid comes out whenever you want it, and then you can shut it off and forget about it for indefinitely long periods of time. Yes, love is precisely like a faucet.” –The Breathtaking Bonehead Brothers

“This Funky Winkerbean feels pointed. ‘Oh, you wish this comic wasn’t such a long parade of human suffering? You want it to go back being the funny gag strip you remembered? Well, guess what: those jokes sucked shit.’” –BananaSam

“The key to understanding this joke is that the plugger is a bear, so he has been awakened during hibernation. The pot of coffee was brewed in September.” –seismic-2

“I assume here that ‘the club’ is an old viking ritual wherein enemies of the clan are brought to the center of the village and clubbed to death. It’s a great way to meet the ladies!” –pugfuggly

“I grew up drinking instant coffee so this is the first occasion I can say ‘Them pluggers shore is fancy.’” –nescio

“I wonder when this was made? The lines make one think of late Deutscher Werkbund, but the matte finish just screams of the influence of the Kilkenny Design Workshops. The whole motif is Danish, but the skeuomorph along the drip basket bring to mind emotional design. [Sigh.] I really thought that Master’s in industrial design would prevent me from becoming a plugger, but I guess form does follow function.” –Voshkod

“Look, whoever-writes-Gasoline-Alley, I’ve got some bad news: kids today do not read Gasoline Alley. They may have long ago, when entertainment options were limited and newspapers common, but now the vast majority of children have no idea what Gasoline Alley is nor are they especially interested. The good news is you can swear all the fuck you want!” –jenna

“Oh, Brandy, he’s taking you to that boardwalk so he can propose again. Your only hope now is to wait until the car’s speed drops below 15 MPH, then jump out.” –Joe Blevins

“I’ve written and deleted a lot of things about the presumptive politics of a guy who looks like Aquarius these days, and none of them were good ideas, so I’m just going to relax and appreciate ‘Humft!’” –matt w

“I’ve gotta go with Snuffy on this one: I honestly cannot think of one crime that a peanut butter sandwich would be the just punishment for.” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“Nice car, Andy Bear. Where’d you get it? At the Not Nice At All Car Store? ZING! I was kidding about it being nice, just so you know.” –Just John

“It takes a certain grim determination to hang a man from a palm tree, I should think.” –WLP

“While the French Fourth Republic collapsed due the Algerian war, leading to the return of De Gaulle in 1958, there was another attempted coup in 1961 against De Gaulle who was carrying out negotiations for Algerian independence. It collapsed immediately because conscript soldiers heard De Gaulle speak on their portable radio and disobeyed their career officers. I think it was just passive resistance and they did not murder their officers, but since what is at stake is not just democracy in France but eliminating annoying Crock characters, I’ll allow it.” –Ettorre

“I don’t care about the joke in Six Chix. All that matters is that after seeing the anxiety-inducing super spreader event happening over the course of weeks in Funky Winkerbean, I can scroll back up to the soothing sight of the ultimate self-isolator.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“I love that things at this department store have broken down to the point where one customer just shows up to the gift-wrapping booth with a loose cookpot: no lid, no box, no warranty and presumably no receipt. ‘Yeah, I dunno, just make it look like a bicycle or something.’” –Doctor Moreau

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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.

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Gil Thorp, 12/10/20

Well, it looked like Gil’s little stunt — benching his feuding #1 and #2 QBs and putting his #3 QB in at the helm of a wacky offense — worked! It didn’t work in the sense that it brought the team a championship (they’re playing for conference runner up here in their last game) but it worked in the sense that it taught his fractious starters a lesson, a lesson they learned so well that neither of them has much interest in playing football at all anymore. I assume in panel three we’re meant to understand that they’re doing “No, after you” pantomime gestures down on the sideline that are so exaggerated that they can easily be interpreted by their wide-eyed classmates sitting up in the stands.

Pluggers, 12/10/20

Reed Hoover may have passed away more than a year ago, but his utter dominance of Pluggers will never end. Like longtime and recently retired artist Gary Brookins before him, new guy Rich McKee isn’t afraid to turn a cold eye on the pathetic, eager suggestions clogging the pluggermail@aol.com inbox and say sneeringly “Sorry, folks, none of you can hold a candle to Reed.” Then he selects one of Reed’s banked Pluggers pitches at random, which I assume he keeps in an ornate wooden box.

Crock, 12/10/20

I never think the jokes in Crock are any good, so it’s kind of a relief to see a strip where they didn’t bother to include one! Just a little vignette about an incompetent military officer and his men, who are about to murder him.