Cul de Sac: Hey! The kid on the Blisshaven sign is that kid who's on TV!

For all the comics around that feature children, Cul de Sac is the only one that really gets what kids are like. This is just exactly how kids act. Every panel and every character, even the silent girl in the fourth panel whose emotions are conveyed entirely through the art, rings true to life. I'm especially fond of the wild overreaction at the end, which isn't anything like a traditional punchline, but is nonetheless far funnier than every other final panel I've seen today.

Cul de Sac: I don't see what's wrong with being grabby.

This comic is a perfect example of why Cul de Sac is so great.

The first panel highlights the specificity of the characterization. Grabbiness is, of course, a problem lots of children have. But it's something that Alice, specifically, would have a problem with.

The second panel highlights the expressiveness of the drawing. Look at those eyes. Look at that hair. Look at the tiny little mouth. Look at the little lines around the rabbit. It's completely clear what's happening, and it's completely clear what's about to happen.

And the third panel highlights the smartness of the dialog. It would have been easy, and still funny, to just see Alice screaming. Instead, we get an even funnier description of that scream. "An inhuman cry of anger, betrayal, horror and thwarted grabbiness" is just great, great writing.

Cul de Sac: My home is crawling with philistines.

When you see the "Trope" label down at the bottom of a post here, it usually means I'm annoyed with a comic for being hackish. But that's not the case with this Cul de Sac. This is a really simple joke, and one everybody's seen a million times before, and yet it works. In general, the difference between a well executed trope and a poorly executed trope is the quality of the characters and dialog that surround it.

Cow and Boy, Cul de Sac and My Cage: Tolstoy was a twinkie man.

I'm sort of cheating on the whole Best Comic of the Day thing by listing three comics here, but they're all terrific. I appreciate the reversed gender roles in today's My Cage--generally the trope involves women trying to lose weight before their weddings. And "mongkeys" are always funny. But my heart is with the Cow and Boy below, which reads, as it often does, as though it were written just for me.

Cul de Sac: MUSH

Cul de Sac more or less specializes in mortifying.

Cul de Sac: Hi, Petey Potterpoop!

This is the finest artistic representation of mortification that I've ever seen. It helps that the comic is a continuous long shot, with Petey situated in such a way that he almost seems to be a part of the background. Viola, by contrast, seems enormous, which is how she must seem to Petey as well.

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.

Cul de Sac: Sad!

Cul de Sac is highly derivative of Peanuts.

This is not a bad thing.

But it's one thing to just be derivative of Peanuts. It's another thing to recreate its mood while building a world filled with interesting characters of your own. And that's what Richard Thompson has done.

This strip in particular is both very funny and kind of terrifying, both because of the general situation and because of the specificity of the characters' behavior. It basically does for charades what Freaks and Geeks did for dodgeball. And Alice's guess *was* at the very least a lot closer than "cheese monkey."

Cul de Sac: YAGH! It's the HEADLESS SURFER DUDE!

One of the things that makes good comic strips good is attention to detail, that they do little things lesser comic strips don't do. Case in point: the final panel of this Cul de Sac, in which Alice's word balloon is more visible than--and can actually be seen through--her father's head.