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Not a lot to say about this. Just want to wish everyone a happy new year, and to submit this new calendar for consideration.

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Jerry Marcus, creator of Trudy, had worked for many years as a magazine cartoonist before starting the strip. His work had appeared in places like The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, and Trudy bears quite a resemblance to the things you might see in those publications. For most of its life it was a single panel, though on Sundays newspapers would do what they often do with panels and reprint several of them in one section. For a period of a year and a half in 1968 and 1969, Marcus decided to make it into a multiple panel strip, with some success, but returned to the single panel format in 1970, where it would remain until it ended in 2005.

I thought this particular panel would be appropriate today, as we approach the new year. Back in 1966 it may have seemed a bit odd for someone to say something like this, but these days there are several websites dedicated to tracking the new year as it goes across the world. It's crazy to think that, if you wanted, yo…

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Tiger, created by Bud Blake, was never known for its great writing. It's mostly remembered for its deceptively simple artwork and inventive character designs. Blake got his start as an illustrator for an ad agency, and the skills he learned there never failed him. Even though readers may not have been able to tell the characters apart from each other based on their voices or mode of speech, or even remember their names, each of them is immediately recognizable due to their distinct and unique character designs. My personal favorite is Punkinhead, not pictured here, who always wears an oversized button-up shirt and a long necktie that drags on the ground.

Also, I'm with Bonnie. I don't really like January either.

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Re-gifting is normally frowned upon, but I don't think it's as bad as a lot of people think. Giving someone else a gift that someone gave you doesn't mean that you don't like the gift. It just means that you think someone else would like it more than you do, or even if you like it, you don't necessarily need it, but someone else might. That said, I'm not sure what need a dog or an owl would have for a necktie, even in the comic version of the Okefenokee Swamp. I think Albert the alligator is the only one who has worn a tie before, if memory serves. Maybe some Christmas that tie will make its way to him.

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Ponytail was a fairly standard gag-a-day comic about a teenage girl and her on-and-off (sometimes within the span of hours) boyfriend Donald. The strip and its creator Lee Holley are not well known, though Holley did have quite an interesting career. He started drawing comics in his teenage years, and even sold a few, and after serving in the Navy in World War II, he began working at Warner Bros. on various Looney Toons shorts. He continued to try and sell comics during his years there, and his work eventually caught the eye of Hank Ketcham, creator of Dennis the Menace. Ketcham hired him on to assist not only with the strip, but also with the Dennis the Menace Little Golden Books and various Dennis advertisements. While working with Ketcham, he also did one-off gag comics on the side for Teen Magazine, where the character who would become Ponytail developed. He was able to sell the Ponytail idea to King Features, and Ponytail began in November of 1960. Ketcham off…