Pearls Before Swine: JEFFY, fat and tattooed, sits on death row receiving last rites.

Not even Jeffy can outrun the law forever, I suppose.

Dog Eat Doug: I see a bright future for you in the banking industry.

A cookie is the most delicious metaphor of all.

Cow and Boy: Don't talk about global warming. People hate that.

"Barney's movie had heart, but Football in the Groin had a football in the groin."

Cow and Boy: Happy Anniversary!

I've mentioned before that I really like seeing older incarnations of a comic juxtaposed against the current incarnation. All the better when the cartoonist manages to do it in a funny way.

Get Fuzzy: Bucky, China didn't build a wall to keep Muppets out.

Today's Get Fuzzy is about the great Muppet menace, which is disappointingly unlikely to become a New Year's Eve trope.

Garfield: Just look at me. What do I have to show for myself?

Garfield is the sort of comic that does so many things wrong that it's easy to forget the things it does right. Garfield Minus Garfield has sort of rectified that, but today's installment is the rare instance in which the titular character's presence actually makes the comic better and, in this case, sadder.

The Argyle Sweater: Hmmm...

I hope someday to face a choice like this.

Get Fuzzy: There'll be more Smurfs on you than Ugg boots at a Bieber concert.

I know that picking Get Fuzzy as the best comic of the day every day is kind of lame. But this story is just so good. And that line is amazing.

Get Fuzzy: Why are you so obsessed with how dangerous kids' TV characters are?

In all honesty, I just never want this arc to end. Ever.

At the very least, it needs to become a running gag. I will be very disappointed if this doesn't happen.

Pardon My Planet: Aliens. That's a good one.

I can't decide whether this comic is funny or not.

But I'm absolutely sure that it is terrifying.

Prickly City and Get Fuzzy: ...

Maybe I'm getting soft, because I sure am picking a lot of best comics of the day these days, but both of these comics are very funny in a completely different way than today's 9 Chickweed Lane is funny. 9 Chickweed Lane is funny because of its strong dialog. It features no action of interest.

Today's Prickly City and Get Fuzzy, on the other hand, are notable for their limited--or complete lack of--dialog. While the humor in Prickly City is dependent on the dialog, the punchline is image-based.

Get Fuzzy, meanwhile, has been set up by the last couple weeks of Bucky's insane communist Muppet conspiracy theories. Today's strip is Satchel's silent reaction to them. The whole thing is the punchline.

9 Chickweed Lane: What was I saying?

When Brooke McEldowney isn't fucking around with Nazi love triangles, he's often writing some of the best dialog in the comics section. Today's strip is a good example of that. There' nothing much happening. It's just two people talking. But the conversation is just so well done. It's a very natural sounding joke.

So, in short: fewer Nazi love triangles, more stories about two people talking.

La Cucaracha: Less Latinas on TV with "reeely theeek fony axsents."

Rare is the day that I praise La Cucaracha, but the excellent aping of exaggerated dialect here made me laugh.

Though he doesn't come right out and say so, Lalo Alcaraz seems to be talking specifically about Modern Family here. Modern Family's depiction of race has always been somewhat problematic--its stories often condemn stereotyping, but only after they've used stereotypes for laughs--so it's interesting to see a Latino cartoonist take issue with it.

Cow and Boy: A wise man once said that smooshing an ice cream cone to your forehead does not make you a unicorn.

This is not an especially great Cow and Boy. Rather, it's just a regular, old, run-of-the-mill Cow and Boy. And that is why Cow and Boy is awesome.

Mutts and Mother Goose and Grimm: I don't think I have time to send out Christmas cards this year.

I'm feeling magnanimous, so there are just going to have to be a few best comics of the day today.

The cat in this Mother Goose and Grimm is basically me, and the single best way to get me to mention a comic strip is to appeal to my sense of egotism.

Mutts, meanwhile, is just delightful. I don't know what else to say about it, really. It's just so damn delightful. Which, as a general rule, is pretty much what Mutts usually is when it's good.

Get Fuzzy: Even ELMO, the cutest thing EVER?

I actually hate Elmo, but I love that Satchel loves him.

Pearls Before Swine: What do you do when you have a moral dilemma?

Moral compasses are often glitchy, actually.

Off the Mark: Bryan didn't realize who was following him.

Off the Mark is a really solid single-panel gag cartoon that I rarely talk about but usually enjoy. Today's installment uses both Twitter and a pun in service of a joke, which normally wouldn't be a good sign, but Mark Parisi manages to pull it off.

The cartoon works because neither Twitter nor the pun are the joke in and of themselves. Rather, they sort of each work as a set-up and a punchline at the same time; the tweets set up the pun, but the pun does just as good a job setting up the tweets. And what's really funny about the cartoon is the situation.

Which makes sense, given that single-panel cartoons tend to live or die by the absurd situations they depict.

Get Fuzzy: We're lucky in this country that most of the Muppets have been domesticated.

Actually, there's no part of this entire Get Fuzzy storyline that is not amazing.

Big Nate: Success!

Nothing rocks harder than a goat. True story.