The Perfesser is actually a really successful author, he's just depressed for reasons unrelated to his career

Mary Worth, 10/9/23

An opinion I'm coming around to more and more is that it's kind of silly to expect comics as a medium to be "realistic," as they have to impart a lot of plot and character details in a very compressed amount of visual/textual narrative space; that's why it's genuinely fine for Elmo to be walking around in his full football uniform even though nobody would do that in real life. In this scenario, it's actually fairly natural for these two characters to be dealing with this confrontation in different ways -- Keith trying to work his way back to the moment this story he's learning about for the first time began, while Sonia tries to fill in a blank space in her family history that she's lived with her whole life -- and the dialogue doesn't have to be naturalistic, really. But I'm sorry, I will never get over Sonia talking like an unctuous talk show host. "I'm curious... Who is my dad? What makes him tick? How'd he get so beefy? We'll continue the conversation, right after these messages."

Dick Tracy, 10/9/23