Yeah, we get it. Diana Daggers is not friendly; not one of the gals, after all. And Cherry is once again rebuffed as she tries to put on a happy face when dealing with potential opposition. I reckon that’s at least a desirable strategy to employ, even if it doesn’t work most of the time. After all, Daggers cannot complain that it was Cherry’s poor attitude that pissed her off. Clearly, though, Diana just downgraded Cherry to Chump of the Year. And Cherry is nonplussed by her remark.

What did Cherry expect? She couldn’t have forgotten Mark’s remarks about Diana Daggers, unless Cherry was automatically discounting his anxiety because of some gender-based undercurrents. Yet, that never came out in the strip, so let’s just forget it and move on, because this looks like another relationship going nowhere.

Rivera likes to employ normal words as sound effects, rather than the usual onomatopoeic expressions we usually see in comics. I think most of remember those archetypal sound effects seen on the TV version of Batman: “WHAM!”, “BAM!”, and “POW!”  However, today we see Diana engaged in an aggressive “Slice, Slice, Slice” pancake action. This type of sound effect is popular with Rivera, who has previously described actions using common verbs and nouns, such as “Stop”, “Skiid!”, “Grip!”, “Sock!”, and “Reverse”. It is kind of cute, in a way, and blatant parody. And it’s something that underscores Rivera’s aim (I believe) to not let the strip take itself too seriously; something the former version of the strip usually did. “Sense of humor” would not be something we would normally use to describe Mark or the strip of old. But I’ll give Allen props for adding some humor here and there and lightening up the mood (e.g. destroying boats), even if it didn’t always make sense. And wasn’t Mark’s “bat cave adventure” little more than a parody of Indiana Jones movies?