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

A cookie is the most delicious metaphor of all.

Family Circus: ...Grandma said Christmas is just around the corner.

This cartoon is hilarious because Jeffy doesn't understand metaphors. Because he's an idiot.

Family Circus: See, Daddy! The Christmas stuff IS up!

Department stores sure do start whoring Christmas out early these days, don't they? Ha hOH MY GOD WHO DECAPITATED SANTA CLAUS AND AFFIXED HIS HEAD TO A POLE?

Seriously, though, that works surprisingly well as a metaphor, unintentional though I'm sure it was. Unless ... is anyone else seeing that sly smile on Jeffy's face?

Luann: The moon was full and the front door was wide open.

Yep, definitely top 20. Almost certainly top 5, in fact. Here's a list of disturbing shit going on in this Luann storyline:

1. Luann has seen Gunther naked.
2. Luann keeps making flirtatious remarks about it.
3. Luann keeps making flirtatious facial expressions behind Gunther's back.
4. Gunther's legs are kind of beautiful.
5. Gunther is wearing a worm costume...
6. which signifies his emotional state.
   
7. Gunther's worm costume makes it appear as though he has a giant fucking cock.
8. Luann used the phrase, "The moon was full and the front door was wide open." I'm not entirely sure what it means, but I never, ever want to see it again.
   

Ziggy: The businessman's lunch is just like the regular lunch, sir ... except that the government eats half of it!

Ziggy's evidently getting an early start on the tax humor this year.

In fairness, though, this cartoon raises an important point. Given his druthers, a businessman would obviously share half of his meal with other people. This is called "trickle-down nutrition." But because the government steals that half of his meal, he's forced to keep all of his remaining food for himself. And so we see, because of this confiscatory socialist action, everybody but the businessman starves. Until eventually there's nobody left to prepare the businessman's food. And so then the businessman starves too. And so then everybody's dead.

This is a perfect metaphor for economics.

F Minus: Douglas! Those days are over!

The conflation of symbols here is brilliant. Far from being a simple "Doesn't marriage suck!" joke, this cartoon creates a real sense of what growing up and getting married entails. Something is lost here: your childhood and your dependence, your early adulthood and your independence. And sometimes you look back on that and wish you could have it back. But as it happens, minivans, queen-sized beds and interdependence are actually all pretty comfortable.

Beetle Bailey: Burrppppppppppppp.

This is, in all honesty, the most bizarre damn comic I've ever seen in my life. The literal reading, of course, is that General Halftrack is some kind of walking, talking blow-up doll. But I'm just a few credits shy of an English degree, and if my schooling has taught me nothing else, it has taught me how to analyze Beetle Bailey comic strips. And so I know that this is actually an extended metaphor about gassiness. Which just means that I have yet another reason to wish I'd gone into computer science instead.

Hi and Lois: Does Old Man Winter work for the I.R.S.?

See, the snowflakes are Hi's money, and the ground is tax season, and Old Man Winter works for the I.R.S. and is going away for some reason, and tax season, which is the ground, is arriving, from wherever the ground arrives from, that melts snow, which is, um, money. And stuff.*

*No one can torture a tax metaphor like the folks at Mort Walker Inc.

Ziggy: When you're sad and lonely, "trash day" can become a "fresh start."

Tom Wilson apparently believes that there's no metaphor so bad that it can't be made acceptable through the use of quotation marks. But he is very, very wrong. I can sort of go with him on trash representing our troubles, but what the hell are our "empties" supposed to be?

Hi and Lois: What you need is Tax-Lax.

I am genuinely confused as to why Hi thinks that pooping would help him pay his taxes.

UPDATE: Actually, upon review, I'm pretty sure the metaphor at play here is that taxes are poop, and Hi needs a laxative to help pass them. It's a very bad metaphor.

Stone Soup: But we seem to be in a monsoon.

This, sadly, is what passes for a subtle metaphor in the comics section.

In fairness, the comic strip is not a medium that lends itself well to subtlety. Part of this is because of the combination of imagery and words; there's a fairly significant tendency to draw something and then have a character explain the drawing.

That's most of the problem with this Stone Soup. It would have been a more interesting strip if the author had allowed the punchline to fall on the image. Just seeing the two characters standing together silently in the rain would have been more in fitting with the melancholic subject. Instead, she went for the easier laugh, and the comic suffers accordingly.