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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!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/7/14

The arrival of Loweezy and li’l Bizzy Buzz Buzz at Snuffy’s Den of Bachelor Squalor is such a proudly announced non-sequitur that I immediately assumed Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a beloved recurring character in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, if by “recurring” you mean “hasn’t appeared once in the 10 years I’ve been reading this strip but they’ve been publishing the damn thing since 1919, so who knows.” Some cursory Googling (ha) didn’t bring up any evidence of this, though it did reveal that Bizzy Buzz Buzz was some kind of motorized pen that looked like a bird that was a popular toy in the ’60s and ’70s. By the way, if you’re looking for some super-depressing anecdotes, you could do worse than looking at classic toy discussion forums, apparently:

Funky Winkerbean, 7/7/14

Funky Winkerbean is sadly cutting away from Les’s artistic despair to focus on its suuuuper boring comics collecting plot, but I do like the fact that Holly is giving a shout-out to Crankshaft in the final panel here. “Hey, remember that monstrous old hatebag who used to drive the bus, who made all the stupid puns? Whatever happened to him?” (Spoiler: he’s a vegetative husk in a nursing home, dying unloved and alone).

Judge Parker, 7/7/14

This is all the same stuff from yesterday, which I’m glad about because yesterday I forgot to make a joke about the fact that Neddy is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that just says “FRANCE” across the front. Do you think she got it in France? Do you think the French make them specifically to sell to Americans, and then laugh and laugh whenever anyone buys one?

Pluggers, 7/7/14

Not sure how many of you have ever clicked on the “MORE” link next to the archive drop-downs at the top of the site. It takes you to the advanced archives page, where you can search the site for posts with specific comics, on specific dates, and with specific keywords. It’s a nice system, built by my fantastic web developer Adam Norwood, and you should use it to your heart’s content, but really I had it set up for my own use. Sometimes I get a little nagging feeling in the back of my mind to the effect of “did I do this joke before?” and the answer is just a search away:

Anyway, feel free to enjoy the joke I wrote on this subject in October of 2012!

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Judge Parker, 7/6/14

Oh boy oh boy, we’ve reached the best part of any Judge Parker storyline: the part where the smug, upper-crust protagonists get paid. Remember last year when Neddy befriended do-gooders Ross and Thalia and also invested in their dubious water filtration scheme, and Ross supposedly got kidnapped in Niger and it looked like maybe it was all a scam, but it turned out it wasn’t and our heroes were able to call in some shadowy black-ops extraction team to save him? Well, Neddy just got her first check for her trouble. Plus interest! Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

Speaking of gettin’ paid, remember how April’s dad Abbott had gone down to his heavily armed Yucatan jungle compound, to die? Well, apparently that’s for suckers, so he’s going to come back to the states and be Judge Parker Senior’s highly paid script consultant/the strip’s wacky neighbor instead. Come on board, Abbott! There’s room on this gravy train for everybody!

Shoe, 7/6/14

A good strategy for writing a comic strip is to take a joke your 10-year-old nephew heard in school, but then have one of your characters describe it, ashen-faced, as a terrible nightmare he had, to emphasize the intrinsic horror of the narrative.

Panel from Spider-Man, 7/6/14

Now that Spider-Man has been displaced from his super-heroic role by Doc Ock, Peter needs to find new employment — so why not as a mashgiach? “Wait, was this cow butchered improperly? My trayf-sense is tingling!”