Road Kill in the Closet

This is the fourth collection of "Stone Soup" strips to come my way since I discovered them last May. This one takes it almost up to where I joined in with the daily releases. I'm happy to have a lot of laughs, and to learn something more about the goings on among them.There's something for everybody in "Stone Soup." There's Val, who's the glue of the whole strip. She struggles with an awful job while raising her devil children Holly and Alix, dealing with her live-in sister Joan and her two-year-old Max, and her mother as well. All this barely leaves her time to pursue a relationship with handsome motorcycle cop Phil Jackson.There's Joan, a single mom struggling to raise her two-year-old, while her own financial shortcomings force her to live with Val and the rest of her family. She's engaged to Wally, the next-door neighbor, but has a serious case of cold feet, largely because of her disastrous first marriage to Leon.Wally, meanwhile, wants badly to be a husband to Joan and a father to Max. But he's had his fifteen-year-old nephew Andy come to stay with him, more-or-less permanently, and Wally has to deal with all the strains of raising an adolescent male. This while trying to persuade Joan to "set the date" for their wedding.All of them spend their time cracking wise, usually at each other's expense. In this collection, it all comes to a happy ending...but half the fun of comic strips is getting there. There's plenty for anybody to laugh at along the way.