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Blog Year Nine was capped off with throwback to the wacky Gil Thorp summer plots of yore, in a story that began when two fast food ruffians met with vigilante justice in the form of a terrified WHO-O-A! and a mighty, meaty WUD:

Our Hawaiian-shirted hero was a senile former pro wrestler who Gil agreed to wrestle for charity or something, despite the fact that he didn’t even know who Gil was and this would be a good way for him to get terribly injured, probably. Sadly, nobody got terribly injured and actually the old guy probably wasn’t all that senile and it was some kind of double-game long-con wrestling angle.

In Rex Morgan, M.D., yet another wacky elderly patient gave the Morgans free stuff — in this case, a free vacation to San Diego! All they had to do was check up on her rental property, which turned out to be full of sexy ladies who turned out to be strippers with hearts of gold, helping out one of their own who was suffering form breast cancer. Obviously, some of the ladies took a liking to Rex and one maybe flashed him a little, to which he reacted in typical theatrically dickish fashion.

But Blog Year Nine undeniably belonged to an epic seven-month saga in Mary Worth. It began with a cry of psychic pain in the Weston household.

Seems that Dawn got dumped by a dude named Dave, and things got worse when she ran into her ex and his new girlfriend and they invited her to a three-way. Dawn spent a lot of time on the couch watching Game of Thrones and repeating what became the summer of 2012’s catchphrase.

Wilbur decided that a trip to Italy would get Dawn’s mind off her ex. Unfortunately, everywhere she went, she kept having reminders of Dave’s sexy abs and/or genitals thrust in her face.

Determined to cheer up his daughter, Wilbur took her on a cruise ship, which immediately ran aground in a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy. As the ship slowly capsized, Wilbur and Dawn saw human desperation at its worst.

Fortunately, the Westons were rescued via helicopter. Wilbur returned to Santa Royale with a new column idea based on his entirely undeserved good fortune.

Dawn, meanwhile, emerged from the experience with a determination to make a difference in the world, and Mary convinced her to volunteer at the hospital, where she befriended a one-armed fellow named Jim. Jim immediately became fixated on Dawn because she looked uncannily like his sister, who died in the boating accident that claimed his arm, which meant that Dawn was now forbidden to approach any body of water, and also required to have sex with him. Dawn rejected him because he was a possessive, delusional creep, but Jim laid in with the guilt.

Anyway, in her very good psychology class Dawn learned that possessive, delusional creeps just need the love friendship of a good woman and that fixes them, and it totally worked and now Jim can hang out near the water without fear and doesn’t want to murder Dawn at all, even a little. He just wants to be friends! And Dawn enjoys her friendship with him. They say that, if you listen closely, you can hear them continuing to enjoy their friendship, even today.

Tomorrow! Our trip through Soap Opera Past finally reaches the present day. What plots from the past year merit recording in the Book of Eternity?

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2010-11 was another great year for my holy trinity of Mark Trail, Apartment 3-G, and Mary Worth. Just in time for the midterm elections, Mark Trail wove a tale of political intrigue! Seems a mysterious fenced compound popped up on the edge of Mark’s land. Turns out it was the home of a little girl who adopted a deer (note that while I expect Apartment 3-G to conform to some kind of reality, I didn’t even blink at this in Mark Trail), whose stepfather Frank planned to stage caged hunts for bigwigs as some sort of plan to become governor. Obviously the little girl objected, as did (in particularly bad-ass fashion) Mark, ruining everybody’s fun. Frank sure was mad! Deer-kicking mad.

Mark punched him, obviously, and later Frank tried to kill Mark with his car but at the last minute a deer knocked his car off a cliff (haha, I know) and Mark saved him, for further humiliation purposes.

Mary Worth, meanwhile, forwarded the story of Dr. Jeff’s drippy daughter Dr. Adrian, who finally found the love of a good man in handsome cop Scott. Adrian got wedding-planning help from her “outspoken” pal Jill, who didn’t care for Scott, a feeling that was mutual. Later, at the rehearsal dinner, Jill got bombed, literally threw herself at Dr. Jeff, then denounced the concept of marriage in increasingly desperate terms.

Turns out Jill had ideological objections to a traditionally patriarchal institution was just a bitter old maid who had been left at the altar, and Mary literally told her to change the past by altering her memory in either the best or worst session of cognitive-behavioral therapy I’ve ever seen. Jill was too ashamed to come to Adrian’s wedding, of course, but she did spend a wildly overextravagant gift!

But as fantastic as those two plots were (and they were!) in Blog Year Seven my heart was won by Apartment 3-G, which included an adventure for all three of its main characters … as they dressed … in the dark.

Yes, Tommie applied to be on a TV makeover show, and somehow got Margo and Lu Ann roped in as well. Sinister makeover host “Mama Kat” insulted all three gals in turn and then openly announced her intention to annihilate their wills.

Lu Ann had her very sense of self (i.e., her hair) threatened, while Margo just resolved to use the opportunity to get as much free stuff as possible. Later, the girls met their stylist, “Mister Mojo,” who was written as some kind of sassy gay stereotype, though that was undermined by the art, which, as I put it at the time, answered the question “What if Mr. Clean were a supervillain who was also a resurrected undead king from ancient Sumer?”

After enduring some psychological gameswomanship, the girls’ makeovers were revealed. Margo looked like herself, with longer hair and exposed shoulders.

Lu Ann was indeed de-blonded, though the characters and the syndicate colorists couldn’t agree on the final results.

And Tommie … well, I guess they combed her hair properly, for once? That was literally it. Her new outfit was also stupid.

The absolute best part, though, was how all three girls immediately went back to their previous boring looks the instant the makeover show ended. For Lu Ann, this meant an introduction to new innovations in the haircare industry, which she was very enthusiastic about.

Coming up next in Blog Year Eight: Funeral fights! Home births! And the dumbest money-making scheme of all time!

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Mary Worth, 7/8/14

Say, what’s been going on with Mary Worth? Oh, you know, Olive demonstrated the ability to predict the future, or at least predict when branches are about to fall off trees onto Mary a few seconds in advance. And also, she’s got a cyst on her torso? Probably it’s cancer, giving her the second sight that comes just before death, or the egg of a terrible hell-demon that’s possessing her, or something. The important thing is that Olive’s parents are continuing to give in to their physical lusts for each other, just lounging around touching each other’s exposed flesh and having a little light torso-cyst talk, when they should be daughter-centering their lives and tearing that cyst out with their bare hands, immediately.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/8/14

Oh, well, I guess Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a character whose gimmick is that she … likes to clean things? I guess that explains what the deal was with yesterday’s strip, except in the sense that the deal apparently is that Loweezy brought a child over to clean up the Smiths’ filthy house, and that seems like it can’t be right. The question is also open as to whether Snuffy Smith readers were willing to wait a day for this payoff. Meanwhile, I’m really loving Jughaid’s furious expression in panel three. “No, that … that’s not what the expression means at all! God damn it, I’m getting displaced from my slot as the cute little kid in this strip by this?”

Archie, 7/8/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Archie and his girlfriend are of different economic classes, and the imbalance fills him with anxiety!