Amy’s t-shirt says “I ❤️ Joy”, another reference (along with her “classic antiques rogue” look) to the Lovejoy novels and TV series. See John Campbell’s comment on the August 6 2024 strip, and my reply, for more on Lovejoy.
I didn’t, but I was curious enough to seek it out. Mike and Kim went to Vietnam on their honeymoon in May 1997, and Kim sought out her closest surviving relative, a second cousin who worked in a Nike factory for $8 a week. I have also refreshed my memory of a July 1992 seqence when a teenaged Kim received a National Merit Scholarship, which seems to be her last appearance before the Forbes meeting.
Kim was a regular character during the 1970s as a child, then reappeared when she accidentally wandered into a Steve Forbes campaign meeting that Mike was attending in February 1996.
Traditionally the lead time for Sunday strips was well over a month, to allow for color separation, physical distribution, early printing of the comics section and so on. I imagine it could be shorter now as much of that is done digitally, but I doubt it’s got down to 11 days, even if GBT could write and pencil an immediate response.
“popinjay” is an archaic word for a parrot, which became an insulting term for someone vain or of extravagant dress. Long out of fashion, the Google ngrams viewer shows it having a revival in the last 15 or 20 years, particularly in the British English corpus.
In story time, literally a few days have passed between Lottie breaking up with Nero and today’s SOLVER strip over on John’s website. In the strip above it’s about four years earlier and Lottie is 15. Sometimes a weight gain is just a weight gain, and as Lottie says elsewhere, “Grote women are wide”.
Amy’s t-shirt says “I ❤️ Joy”, another reference (along with her “classic antiques rogue” look) to the Lovejoy novels and TV series. See John Campbell’s comment on the August 6 2024 strip, and my reply, for more on Lovejoy.