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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 however fast you needed them to, and definitely faster than any airplane could.

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I really tried to find the date for this strip, but couldn't find it anywhere. If anyone happens to know, feel free to comment.

Gasoline Alley is, I think, unique among comic strips in that all of its characters have aged over the years in real time over its entire run. It's had quite a long run, too. It began in 1918, and new strips are still produced to this day. It began with the main character, Walt Wallet, finding a baby on his doorstep, who is nicknamed "Skeezix." Walt, Skeezix, and most of the rest of the characters (there are some "timeless" ones) are now quite old in the comic, and there are now five generations of Wallets. Walt is now 115 years old (!) and Skeezix is over 90.

The strip has also had some great artists working on it over the years. Frank King, the original creator, always kept the artwork fairly simple, but still managed to create amazing environments and evoke plenty of feeling and emotion. The strip you see here is a Frank King creation, and it might not look like much at first, but the more you look at it the more subtle touches you find in it. I highly enjoy his work.

This strip involves Skeezix and his little brother Corky trying to visit Santa Claus. It's a bit reminiscent of a Little Nemo in Slumberland comic, complete with Skeezix ending up falling out of his bed at the end. Frank King was much better at lettering than Winsor McCay was, though.

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Here's another one with Buster Brown. This one is more along the lines of what Buster normally gets into. Of course, this time he has the help of all the neighborhood boys. I kind of think the parents were asking for it, though, given that they put swords and guns underneath the Christmas tree. Those were different times, I guess.

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Buster Brown was created by by R.F. Outcault, who also created The Yellow Kid, often cited as the first recurring comic strip character (which he wasn't really, but that's a different blog post). The interesting thing about Buster Brown was that he was very heavily marketed and licensed. While some may think that marketing comic characters is a more recent development, the New York Herald company and later the Hearst newspapers pushed out a ton of licensed products, many of which are featured in this particular strip. Buster Brown is apparently receiving all of his licensed products as Christmas presents, though given his usual antics I don't think he really deserves them. Buster's dog Tige appeared on just as many products as he did, and just three years after the strip's debut the cartoonist is obviously aware of the ridiculous amount of licensing that was going on.

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Here's a device for all of those times that you were wrapping a present and needed an extra finger to put on tape, ribbon, or whatever. I'm horrible at wrapping presents, so this would be quite useful for me. I'd probably need to practice with it a bit, but I could see myself using this every year.

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King Features Syndicate distributed a number of comic strips featuring Disney characters, and some characters that first appeared in those strips went on to become very popular in other media. Most notably of these are Huey, Louie, and Dewey, the three nephews of Donald Duck. They originally appeared in a Donald Duck Sunday comic in 1937. Here we find them singing with other Disney characters who all first appeared in animation. It's unfortunate that their uncle Scrooge doesn't appear here, but not only does he hate Christmas, he had only been created two years prior to this booklet being released.