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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!

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By the sixth year of this blog’s existence, I had pretty much gotten into the groove of what the soaps had to offer. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when some of the plots of 2009-10 shook things up! For instance, Mark had always been a straight-arrow, law-abiding citizen … right up to the time he literally punched a cop in the face.

Don’t worry, Mark didn’t turn evil; it’s just that Rusty was being foolish and got trapped under a car and Mark broke into a store to find a jack but got caught and that sheriff just wouldn’t listen to reason!

In Apartment 3-G, it was the year of delightful Bobbie Merrill, who weaseled her way into the Professor’s practice to get some sleepytime pills, then won his heart with gift baskets and poinsettias and manic episodes. Later, she bought a gun to take out her real target — her estranged husband, Margo’s dad! Turns out she was the one who raised Margo as her own even though Margo’s bio-mom was the maid, which explains a lot about Margo. There was an armed staircase confrontation that sort of petered out, and eventually she was bundled off to a farm private psychiatric facility upstate. The following conversation between Ari and the doctor who referred Bobbie to him demonstrates the low state of professional psychiatry in the A3Giverse:

(And it hasn’t gotten any better lately, either.)

But the champion of long-lost not-relative storylines for Blog Year Six went to Mary Worth. It all began when Wilbur’s girlfriend left town. Left to his own devices, he decided to have a little fun online!

Only to get a very special message.

Kurt Evans was the son of a lady Wilbur had romanced back in college, when he was young and mildly more believable as an object of sexual desire.

Kurt showed up unannounced and the two bonded over some good old-fashioned fishing! Everyone had a good time, except for Wilbur’s actual offspring, who was super not cool with it.

Kurt didn’t want to get a paternity test and Wilbur didn’t push it, which led Dawn to take matters into her own hands and track down Kurt’s real paternal aunt, a delightful drunken snob.

Eventually Kurt agreed to the paternity test, then skipped town before he could be revealed as a fraud, much to Wilbur’s distress and Dawn’s shame. It turned out he just wanted to have a little male bonding time with the least objectionable of his mother’s many paramours, in preparation for his own impending fatherhood, which, good luck with your many inevitable psychological problems, future Kurt Evans-spawn! The two never saw each other again, but at least they’ll always have the memories of their frolicking.

Their frolicking.

SO MUCH FROLICKING. SO MUCH.

Anyway! Tomorrow, year seven: gripping political drama, more drunken loutism, and the first (and last) adventure the A3G gals had together in years!