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Rounding off our December classic comic strips this year is another Rube Goldberg device for getting rid of a New Year's party guest who refuses to leave. They show up at every party, sometimes invited and sometimes not, and don't seem to realize that the party isn't at their house. Introverts such as myself won't need to worry about this problem, as we don't tend to throw parties in the first place, and if we do get roped into going to one, we usually leave quite early anyway. For those of you who do end up throwing a New Year's party, you will definitely need this contraption at some point, perhaps to dispatch more than one unruly guest.

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Another Frank King Gasoline Alley strip, this one on Christmas morning, as Skeezix discovers his presents and fails to get his adoptive parents out of bed. Just take a minute to admire that line work. It's beautiful. You really don't see comic strips like this anymore. Merry Christmas, everybody.

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I've written about Dick Tracy before, in my post on costumed heroes in comic strips. Here's a notable example of the original run of Dick Tracy by the strip's creator, Chester Gould. He obviously didn't want to do anything to derail the story just because it was Christmas. The story seems to end here, with all of the dialogue appearing to tie up all of the loose ends. It's something about an evil plot with poison gas that apparently blinded Tracy somehow. But there's a Christmas tree and wreaths and presents, so that makes it a Christmas strip, right?

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Here's another Gasoline Alley strip, this time from Bill Perry. Perry was originally Frank King's assistant on his run on the strip. The story goes that King was confident that he could teach anyone to be a cartoonist, so he snagged Perry out of the newspaper mailroom to prove his point. He seems to have done pretty well, as Perry took over drawing the Sunday strips in 1951 and did so until 1975. Perry's art doesn't match the quality of King's, at least not in my opinion, but it's certainly enjoyable to look at.

Here we have Chipper and Clovia, the third generation of the Wallet family. Their father is Skeezix, who we saw as a child in the strip I posted previously. While Skeezix and Corky didn't appear to find Santa's castle, Chipper is able to using a guided missile. Of course this is also all a dream, but you would think kids would know better than to dream up that Santa uses an airplane instead of reindeer. Magical flying reindeer would obviously be able to go ho…