Mike: neither delicate nor a genius.

Here's a little challenge for you: try thinking of anything that Mike Patterson can do well. I'll admit that it's not a very fair challenge because of a fact that anyone who's read the strip cannot escape from. To use the mildest, least controversial language possible, the same Mike who weeps piteously that he had to harrass Elizabeth because she was cuter and would certainly cause him to be neglected and forgotten if he didn't take steps to protect himself cannot do a single blasted thing right. Lynn might make a joke of it as she did for the cover art of the latest calender but the sad fact is that Mike is one of the most witlessly inept people to ever make make passers-by ask themselves how he survived childhood. When he's not losing things, blundering into fights with Brad or standing around like a wooden Jesus in a country graveyard while insisting that he cannot make the logical connection between fifty percent of sixty being thirty and one hundred percent of it being sixty, the fatuous clod demonstrates an alarming inability to read the room because of his ludicrous insistence on trying to be one of the guys. His sheer blank-witted incompetence at the seemingly simple task of reading social norms means that he's either got some form of autism-spectrum disorder or is, as I fear, merely a simpleton.

What this unpleasant fact of life all means is that it renders Elly and John even more odious to passers-by than they already are. On the one hand, we have a mother who clearly demonstrates by her horrified, wide-eyed frown that she cannot hope to keep up either physically or mentally with someone who could win first prize in a stupidity contest and on the other, we have a tin god fulminating about alleged defiance that would be better be ascribed to cretinism. Given that Mike has inherited John's fear of change and need to see enmity where none exists and Elly's horrible temper and need to not listen to her conscience, the inevitable re-discovery that people think of him as maybe being a bit of a creep is as traumatic as his incessant re-discovery that bad things happen to other people too.