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.