I looked Rock’n Rollen up in Wikipedia, and apparently he’s still alive at the age of 80 and serving three consecutive life sentences in California after a 1992 incident in which he took hostages in a Los Angeles hotel, believing the rapture to be imminent.
Ryan is presumably on his summer break from school and looking after their son Walt while Amy works. He was seen briefly in the first strip of the flashback (November 15). Amy’s flirting a little with Lovelace but strictly for old time’s sake, I don’t think there’s anything serious in it.
They seem to think of it as an unpleasant, unsightly, down-at-heel place. Whether it really is, or whether this perception is just them having unconsciously absorbed attitudes driven by local rivalry, isn’t entirely clear.
I think it’s meant to be a car-derived van, which is why the wrench bounces off the metal rear door with a CLONK (though CDVs usually have a rear window in that position).
No, this is the strip from August 9, 2002. The dot-com bubble had burst in 2000, but accounting scandals at Worldcom and Adelphia had come to light in June and July 2002, which may have prompted GBT to write this sequence.
Why this is so I don’t know, but Mike’s glasses have done that since (checks archive) the second Doonesbury daily strip in 1970, and probably since Bull Tales. It may be a bit late for GBT to change his style now.
I looked Rock’n Rollen up in Wikipedia, and apparently he’s still alive at the age of 80 and serving three consecutive life sentences in California after a 1992 incident in which he took hostages in a Los Angeles hotel, believing the rapture to be imminent.