Monty: Haven't you seen that WWII Lockheed C-60 hanging in the basement?

There are two punchlines in this comic: the image-based one in the third panel and the dialog-based one in the fourth. They each come in reaction to the set-up in the second panel, and they are each funny on their own. Putting them together, however, somehow makes them both less funny and results in a worse comic. Turning the first punchline into a cut-away with another panel after it robs it of the power it would have had as a final image, while including the image before the fourth panel makes the second punchline seem like an afterthought.

I get the sense that the cartoonist couldn't decide which punchline was better, so he decided to use both. But that's cheating. Part of working in a medium with severe space limitations is being a ruthless editor. Sometimes you have to cut good stuff so that the stuff you do use is more affecting. Not that there aren't times when cheating can pay off. This just isn't one of those cases.

And just in case anyone's wondering, personally, I would have gone with the first punchline. But I'm a big fan of image-based humor, so I'm a little biased.

Peanuts and Get Fuzzy: I would like to say I enjoyed this first day at school...

Today's Peanuts includes some very nice character work and an impressive, intricate set-up leading up to a short, emphatic and very funny punchline.

Today's Get Fuzzy, meanwhile, includes the phrase "cow-based art."

Blondie: Hey, Dag, the vending machines are empty again.

The first two panels in this Blondie, as in many Sunday strips, are throw-away panels so newspapers can excise them to save space while still maintaining the cohesion of the comic. My newspaper, however, decided to leave the first panel in while taking the second panel out. The result being that I thought the comic was about Dagwood being sad about empty vending machines (despite his earlier facade of nonchalance) when it was in fact about him trying to decide whether he wanted pizza or corned beef for dinner. I think.

As it turns out, it's not funny either way.

Beetle Bailey: Originally published in 1969.

Just in case you were wondering whether Beetle Bailey's rambling Sunday strips or Sarge's struggles with his sexuality were anything new, the answer is, er, not so much.

Pearls Before Swine and xkcd: Personally, I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist Christians.

These comics have nothing to do with each other, except that they're sharing Best Comic of the Day honors today. Pearls is really good at playing with the way comics are constructed and using space other cartoons never use. xkcd, meanwhile, is really good at observing the things people say and then making them feel stupid for saying them.*

*And when I say "people," I mean "me."

Herb & Jamaal: Dilated pupils signify intense interest in the subject at which they gaze.

Oh, those women sure do love to shop! Ha ha!

I also have serious doubts as to whether those first two (or even three) panels are necessary in any way.

F Minus and Close to Home: Okay, Rico. You skipped a duck. I'm very impressed.

Because they generally lack recurring characters, single-panel comics mostly have to rely on absurd situations to create humor. These situations are terrifically absurd. They are, therefore, quite humorous.

F Minus has been very good lately, by the way. In the event you don't read it already, you should probably make a point to start doing so.

Crock: What did you give him?

I've long held that Crock is not a real comic strip. It is, instead, a synthetic comic strip-like product. While I'm not a huge fan of something like Frank and Ernest or Herb and Jamaal, both of those comics read like actual comics. They're hackish, sure, but they're hackish in recognizable ways. They always have a set-up and they always have a punchline. Crock, on the other hand, has neither. It instead just sort of meanders from panel to panel in a way that seeks to imitate what real comic strips look like. While Frank and Ernest is low-grade cheddar cheese, Crock is like a tub of processed cheese-flavored goo.

Given all that, I'm not going to be too hard on today's Crock. After all, this strip has an actual set-up and an actual punchline. Sure, it's hackish and politically ignorant, but the author really seems to have taken some sort of pride in his work for once. Why, I'm not really sure, but good for him anyway!

Indeed, today's Crock just goes to show that anyone can be an ignorant hack if they're willing to work hard enough. There's a lesson here, I'm sure of it.

Betty: Deciding which to pay and when gives me the feeling that I have control over my life.

I am a fan of the quiet-loud joke construction. It's basically the comics section equivalent of the quiet-loud-quiet song format Nirvana made so famous.

Get Fuzzy: Reflections on a vase

The punchline to this comic exists in the unseen fourth panel and is funnier for being unseen. The third panel, meanwhile, is made funnier by the moment of uncertainty the absence of the obvious punchline causes. The second panel is made funnier when we realize--the uncertainty of the third panel having passed--that Bucky's not actually looking at the vase. And the first panel is made funnier by knowing just what kind of reflections Bucky means. And so maybe the punchline is in the first panel. And so maybe the first panel is the fourth panel. And it's at its funniest the moment you just catch sight of that.

Cow and Boy: Is all this cuz I said Ariel was prettier than Princess Jasmine?

It seems to me that this is a much better version of the whole Mary-Ann or Ginger argument (Mary-Ann, obviously). The only problem is that I go back and forth on it. In the end, I probably have to go with Jasmine, on account of her movie being better. But if you ask me again in a couple minutes, I might answer differently.

All of this is peripheral to the comic at hand, of course, which is very clever and much more subtle than the punchline would indicate, specifically in the way that the entire construction of the comic goes to undermining virtually everything Boy says. Except, maybe, for that last part.

Curtis: Z

As bizarre as Ray Billingsly's annual Kwanzaa interludes are, he does deserve credit for being willing to change up the format of his strip, even on a regularly scheduled and temporary basis. Considering that the comics section is plagued by endless mediocre repetition, I wish more cartoonists were willing to take even a modicum of risk to tell a different sort of story every now and then.

Billingsly also deserves credit for being willing to poke fun at himself for those bizarre Kwanzaa interludes, as he does in today's comic. Today's comic also has the advantage of immediately reestablishing Curtis's major character traits, thus preparing us for another year of standard-issue Curtis. Until the next bizarre Kwanzaa interlude rolls around, that is, for which nothing could really prepare us.

Cul de Sac: Welcome, Blisshaven Parents! Please enjoy our Winter Pageant!

I write a lot more about bad comic strips than I do about good comic strips, mostly because it's easier to snark than to analyze. I'd like to change that a little bit, so I'm introducing a new feature: The Best Comic of the Day. It's pretty self-explanatory. Most of the time I'll add commentary, but sometimes I might not.

This Cul de Sac is the first entry in the feature. And it's not just the Best Comic of the Day, but one of the best comics I've seen in a long time. It's nothing we haven't seen before--a school play, proud parents, kids forgetting their lines--but it's done really, really well. The comic doesn't have a traditional punchline, but every panel is funny in its own way. The drawing in the second and third panels perfectly capture the emotions of a child standing up before what seems to him to be a large audience. The writing perfectly captures the rhythms of a child delivering his lines--"It is always winter time, wherever I may. Go!" And the final panel even gives us very specific character-based humor, with the differing reactions from Beni's parents.

Betty: Beep! Beep!

This is one of those cases where the comic would be better if the third panel were omitted, but actually omitting the third panel would probably render the joke incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't read the comics section every day. It's not the cartoonist's fault, so much as it a flaw in the medium. Daily exposition is a necessary component of even the very simple continuing stories in comic strips because cartoonists just can't trust their readers to stay up to date or pay a ton of attention. It doesn't have to be this way, of course, but it is the way the medium has evolved at the present time.

Red and Rover: Rover, look. I'm inivisible!

The way cartoonists use words and pictures plays a large role in the quality of any given comic. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud labels comics in which the words and drawing do exactly the same job as "duo-dependent." They're generally the worst kind of comics because they indicate on the part of the cartoonist a lack of confidence in both his own ability to make himself understood and the ability of his readers to understand.

This Red and Rover doesn't quite meet that criterion, but it's far too close for comfort. Red's dialog isn't so much complementary as it is redundant. It exists mostly because Brian Bassett didn't trust his audience to see Red in the tree. But the whole point of the comic is that Red is hard to see! Putting the word bubble there makes Red easy to see, and makes Rover the butt of the joke instead of all of us.

Cow and Boy: Life's hard, Cow.

This comic is a good example of Cow and Boy's standard format. The first two panels are devoted to Boy's abstract philosophical argument. The third panel consists of Cow's rejoinder to that argument. And the fourth panel contains the absurd literalization of the argument, which reveals that Boy's argument is specious and that Cow is in the right. It's an effective, often very funny formula.

Cow and Boy owes a certain debt to Calvin and Hobbes, of course. The philosophical discussions, Boy's self-interest, and Cow's general correctness are all lifted from the school of Bill Watterson. As is to be expected, Cow and Boy suffers by the comparison, as it is quite a bit more limited in the scope of its themes and the depth of its relationships. That said, it also allows itself to get a lot more ridiculous than Calvin and Hobbes ever did, and indeed its fourth panels often seem more inspired by single-panel cartoons than any multi-panel comic, thriving as they do on absurdity. The combination of sensibilities makes for a surprisingly unique comic strip.

Ziggy: I always bring a little extra money in case there's another postage hike before I get to the window!!

Considering it's appearing in a Ziggy cartoon, this is a very clever joke. It contains two parts. First, it's hilarious because service at the Post Office is slow. Second, it's hilarious because service at the Post Office is expensive. Granted, neither of these potential sources for humor is even remotely original, and at least one of them is rather strikingly false, but for Ziggy it really is an impressive piece of art.

Which is to say, it's not just a piece of shit. It's like two pieces of shit in one.

Dog Eat Doug: "Galactic Zombie Squirrels Vs. The Sorority Babes with Chainsaws"?!!

There's something about the construction of this joke that makes it less funny than it ought to be. The humor comes from the ridiculous inappropriateness of the title, but the comic is too wordy for it's own good and buries the title underneath unnecessary verbiage. Part of this is just Brian Anderson's style, as he tends toward the long-winded, but it doesn't really work here.

That said, I really wish this movie were real.

Lola: I have, jerk!

This comic is hilarious because Lola is very dumb.

Alternatively, this comic is hilarious because the cartoonist is so lazy that he is perfectly comfortable manipulating his characters into unrealistic situations if doing so will facilitate the telling of whatever lame joke he's thought up today.

Drabble: You didn't come home from the store. You came home with the store!

This comic is hilarious because:

1. Ruth has bought a lot of food,
2. Ralph is incapable of uttering anything but old cliches, and
3. the entire middle section is completely unnecessary and only exists because the cartoonist decided to be lazy and stretch a three-panel daily into a Sunday strip.