Bad Machinery by John Allison for February 20, 2025

That’s Shelley Winters on Lottie’s tablet in the last panel. Presumably Lottie is trying to give the Sewerman General to her. Shelley has a notable history of going for large, muscular men, so it seems like he might be right up her alley. However, I believe it’s the prospect of a Karen/Mike romance that she’s reacting to. Shelley is well familiar with both of them.

She worked with Mike at the Cormorant for a while, until the Great Tackleford Show incident got her fired and him impaled by a giant bee. Earlier in this story, Mike described Shelley as the worst reporter he’d ever worked with. Fortunately, she’s a much better children’s book writer.

Shelley’s been Lottie’s friend and mentor for seven or eight years now, so while we haven’t actually seen much of Shelley and Karen interacting, and Lottie has described Karen as “never a detail-orientated parent”, presumably she at least knows who this strange woman hauling her teenage daughter off in a Maserati is.

We don’t actually see the Karen/Mike romance, but next time we saw Mike, in the apocryphal story “The Great Unboxing”, he was living in Karen’s house. By the time of Solver, he’s still there. In the most recent Solver story, Lottie has described Mike as her step-dad, but I’m not sure if there was actually a wedding involved, or if it’s just convenient shorthand for, “my mother’s long-term live-in boyfriend”.

Only one more strip to go.