Second youth
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Marvin, 1/26/18
As I’ve noted at least once in this space, there was a Sally Forth storyline in, I think, the mid-to-late ’00s when there was a flashback to Ted and Sally meeting in college and Sally is wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. Since I had been reading Sally Forth since I was Hillary’s age, her parents were canonically the same age as my parents, so the idea that Sally in college liked a band that was hip among my own cohort was a shattering blow to everything I held dear about my own age/hipness/relationship with adulthood/etc. But that was years ago, and I’ve long made peace with both the concept of comic-book time and my own ongoing slide into middle age, so I’m not alarmed to learn that the super-square parents of the syndicated comics’ worst baby attended a concert of a band who had a monster hit song 26 years ago, even though liking that band had been a marker of a certain avant-garde sensibility at the time, back when I was in college. Anyway, the sting is mitigated a bit by the fact that the dialogue here was obviously written by a space alien or near-sapient computer program that tried to imagine how a human would describe going to a rock concert, and came up with “screaming” (?) until your “jaw is sore” (??), which is technically correct but also profoundly off.
Mary Worth, 1/26/18
Oh, it looks like five-term Massachusetts Senator John Kerry Ted Miller’s boredom with retirement now has an outlet: turning Mary Worth into the muffin queen! You’d think that the current playing field for baked goods — dominated by massive industrial bakeries at one end and gourmet local boutique pastry shops at the other — represents a market that has pretty much shaken out, but Ted, who used to be a salesman of some indeterminate nature at one point, thinks Mary and her kitchen can produce enough lucrative muffins to make both him and her (but not, pointedly, Dr. Jeff) wealthy. Mary’s already posing for the label in the first panel!
