Ugh, sorry this is up so late in the day! I finished it last night just as a terrible outage took the internet from us all.

So this one entertains the idea of homeschooling, which Lilana and Anna both brought up in response to the last comic. Honestly I initially thought that Mona would probably try to homeschool Betty but that there’d be some kind of barrier to it that’d require her to send Betty for public education. The reason for this has less to do with what the characters would do and more to do with the fact that I have twelve years worth of memories of public education to draw on and like zero years of memories of homeschooling, and I don’t know that I could do it any kind of justice. But I mean, I’m already writing a comic about having a child when I don’t have one, so I’ll see how it might fit into the story better? It’s definitely something I should know about more generally.

While working on this, I was playing all of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the background, essentially audio-only, as if Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Wil Wheaton, and a bevy of halting guest stars were performing a special podcast just for me. I really enjoy first season Next Generation, despite the kind of not-great quality of the productions, the kind of social unpleasantness of a lot of it (rape gangs! The episode “Code of Honor!” the sex planet with the evil god space station!), and the lame, lacking drama. The reason: it has this weird high-minded quality to it, probably owing more to Gene Roddenberry’s kind of enlightened hedonism New Age beliefs than anything. From what I understand, basically the writers throughout the first season were furious with Roddenberry for just rewriting the hell out of them, banning things like interpersonal conflict between the characters and adding lame whimsical devices (Picard’s French chauvinism, Picard hating children, etc.), and adding long, high-minded speeches about how much cooler 24th-century people are than we are (Riker’s speech in “Lonely Among Us” about how Starfleet serves steaks that are “just as tasty and nutritious as meat, but without the need to enslave animals for food.” Which is cool but it has nothing to do with the scene at hand?) Every episode is also about facing some kind of god-being at the edge of human experience–like, every episode is about this! All of them! The result is something that feels a lot more like a kind of Transcendental Meditation-style cult parable than, say, Star Trek, and I kind of love it. It is such a weird television artifact. Later, of course, it turns into a much more lovable yet less singularly weird, great thing.

There will be some old comics this week, and at least one new one! Hopefully two–it depends on time. The next one is gonna be about Edith Wharton.