Today is Boxing Day or St. Stephen’s Day or Wren Day (Lá an Dreoilín) or, as I call it, the point when if I haven’t used a cartoon yet it’s probably become irrelevant because they’ve all been about Christmas for the past three weeks. Fiona Katauskas takes an appropriately irreverent and silly look at Boxing […]
You’ll note Santa’s helmet at the left. This banner was from 1944, 80 years ago, six months after D-Day and right in the heart of the Battle of the Bulge, which explains the light in the window at the right. The war was also in the heart of most comic strips on Christmas that year. […]
Wallace the Brave (AMS) and Spud the … um … the Spudacious … offer a holiday take that breaks through the usual seasonal noise. And speaking of noise, I’d rather have a couple of kids come by with an absurd but amusing rap than hear Musak at the store in which nameless singers flail at […]
I’m mixing political cartoons with humor today, and starting with a question: Does anybody really care about this issue anymore? Clay Jones isn’t the only left-of-center cartoonist to bring it up, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anyone right-of-center whining about the whole “Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays” kerfuffle. I suppose maybe I have […]
“Many a truth is spoken in jest” and Jim Benton hits on one here. Things seem to be degenerating faster, or at least more blatantly, than expected, but I’m going to provide readers with a few laffs today while we give the editorial cartoonists some time to catch up. Meanwhile, I hope you haven’t already […]
Jeff Stahler (AMS) ruins all our fun by pointing out the obvious, which is that there are a lot of theories about drones that are downright screwy and that Occam’s razor continues to rule: The simplest explanation is generally correct. One night in the depths of winter, a group of us were on a hilltop […]
I’m trying to be more productive than the fellow in Matt’s cartoon, but there does seem to be a lot of letdown in the actual week we’re going through. I’m going to assume things will pick up along about the Eighth Day of Christmas. Which is Maids A-Milking and let’s hope we do better than […]
The Dogs of C Kennel (Creators) are experiencing a temporary lull, but we’re not. However, St. Stephen’s Day is, granted, not as exciting as Christmas and the dopamine hit is more subtle. We’ll get to the wren in a minute, but there’s no park. I just liked the headline, because if you are of the […]
It’s always nice to get the family together for the holidays, and here they are before they went Hollywood. As for the current holiday, Greg Kearney noted the downpour in Maine, which was worse than we had it next door, but we also had some power failures and erasure of snow-making on the ski hills […]
Ivan Turgenev’s On the Eve is one of my favorite novels, but it bombed in Russia when it was published in 1859, in large part because it was dismissive of effete student idealists who talked reform and accomplished nothing, as one of them admitted: Plus ca change, baby, though I’d suggest that Jeff Danziger (Counterpoint) […]
Jack Ohman plays with the Nativity story to illustrate the plight of the poor and homeless in San Francisco. It’s nicely played, though, of course, he’s hardly the first cartoonist to make the comparison. But his multi-panel approach really pays off, adding detail and frustration to a common plaint. One way to differentiate among these […]
I’m with Lizzie in Reply All (WPWG), with some mixed feelings about the holiday season but a large dose of “When is this over?” For the self-employed and empty-nested, the holidays are mostly days when the banks and the post office are closed, but, in addition, we’re entering a Dead Zone where a lot of […]
Zits (KFS) made me smile Sunday. Note that it’s not a slam on the Nutcracker itself, and I like classic ballet. But the guys agree that the same ballet every Christmas gets stale, even as a tradition. My smile came because I’m retired and no longer have the yearly discussion of whether we will send […]
I wish I didn’t like Megan Herbert‘s commentary so much. Advent calendars have become so commercialized that it’s not easy to find ones that just offer a small picture of a candy cane or something similarly of the season, hearkening back to a time when we were excited by the approach of Christmas but more […]
Several comic strips have been anticipating Christmas with gags about kids trying to clean up their acts for Santa and people decorating their trees, but now we’re getting right down to the real nitty gritty, and Monty (AMS) brings up the topic of Christmas cards as we enter the home stretch. I used to get […]