No, not yet, not just because it would wreck my publishing schedule if I did drop it. I’ve only rarely ragequit any comic strips — Funky Winkerbean twice, the first time in the 90s before we even had a word for what I was doing; 9 Chickweed Lane and Pibgorn; I feel like there’s another but I can’t think what it might be. (Depending how Crankshaft this week turns out I might be drop-kicking that one into orbit.) But the recently concluded story and the sudden shift to another has tested me because, well, you’ll see.

So, I write this to catch you up to early June 2026 in Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker, and all my plot recaps past and I assume for now future should be at this link. Now let’s get to Cavelton.

Judge Parker.

15 March – 7 June 2026.

When I last checked in Bogdan, who’d helped Randy and April Parker escape their Siberian Or Whatever prison, turned up at Alan Parker’s place. He shows Alan, Ann, and Katherine a video on his phone from Randy.

Randy, with a pretty big beard and a deeply sad look, explains that he and April can’t come home just yet because whoever it is is still after April and they have to resolve things, and also he’s really screwed up with their daughter Charlotte. Thanks for looking after her and please don’t tell her about this video. When Bogdan asks where Charlotte is, saying Randy wants him to check on her, Ann quickly steps in to say she’s off on an extended school trip for an unknowable length of time and her dad is tired and he should leave now.

Ann, perhaps drawing on her experience pulling scams, explains to the other Parkers: we don’t know anything about this Bogdan guy other than that he has a video from Randy that might well have been coerced. It’s a good point; even we, the audience, while we’ve seen Bogdan being nice and helpful to Randy, have really no idea his whole deal.

That deal gets sinister a couple days (reader time) later when we see Charlotte hanging out with Neddy Spencer at the Spencer Rebuilt Horse Ranch. Neddy notices someone watching them, sends Charlotte running away, and just as Bogdan gives chase Neddy gives him a punch in the throat and Ann gives Randy’s old fraternity paddle, over the head. Neddy — who has no idea who this is or why this is — is appalled when Ann says they’re not calling the cops on the guy they’ve very soundly beat down.

Instead Ann has them drive Bogdan to her storage locker, where (we learn) she’s kept stuff to be someday returned to her victims, which leaves me wondering when she moved all this to Cavelton, a place she visited only briefly before fleeing under suspicion of murder and then going on to a two-year prison term. And here the women tie up Bogdan and extract information out of him, under threat of being beaten with a wrench.

Now. I know, and I’ve defended, Marciuliano’s style of not so much having plots as throwing the Judge Parker cast into a bunch of scenarios, any of which are exciting and could be used for a solid story, as Neddy Spencer even notices in a Sunday strip not calling attention to that. And I don’t insist on characters making good or correct or wise choices. But Ann and Neddy here took a man they attacked and beat unconscious (which I don’t fault them for; they have good reason to believe he’s a danger and his stated reason for creeping on Charlotte is flimsy). And rather than bring him to the cops or a hospital they abducted him and threatened him with further beatings unless he gave them information.

I get people making immoral choices out of desperation. But I’m not feeling their desperation. April or Randy or both have gone running off to whatever their super-secret criminal underworld nonsense too many times in the past decade for me to buy it as dramatic. And I can’t even believe that there’s a specific reason for Randy and April to be still on the run or undercover or whatever because it’s all built on this April Parker Super-Spy thing that I don’t feel any truth from. I’m not sure how much of that is because I know whatever Randy and April are doing won’t be a story, just scenes. But without feeling that Ann and Neddy will have any emotional consequence from this, all we have is these two main characters beating a man senseless because, ultimately, he delivered a minute of video from Randy Parker.

Anyway they get nothing from him, though we the audience get convinced Bogdan is actually not up to anything worse than being kinda Russian-y. He grabs their wrench and their car to drive off, I had assumed, back to his own car. Neddy and Ann get back to Alan Parker’s house, I suppose by uber, where Alan’s been afraid because the cops called to say the car was found abandoned, which is weird because you’d think Bodgan would have parked somewhere near Spencer Farms where he was following Charlotte. So he must have walked from wherever he abandoned the car back to wherever his car was? Or he gave up on his car? Doesn’t matter. This is stuff I worry about when I have a joke or when I’m angry at the story.

Ann, shifting gears so fast it stripped my transmission, is shocked that her father would be afraid just because his car turned up abandoned at the same time his daughter disappeared without anyone knowing where or why. Ann asks if he’ll ever be confident she isn’t reverting to her old criminal ways, a question that would have more punch if it didn’t come as she returned from binding and gagging a man she had beaten unconscious.

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But, as Alan Parker observe the 15th of May — as good a time to mark the new story as any — the important thing is she’s back, and with that, he heads out, I guess with the returned car. Katherine is worried he’s doing something really borderline-senile. He’s actually gone to the diner to get a burger and see if they’d hire Ann, what with the increase in business since Lorna Starr joined the staff and all. Jerry the diner guy is a bit hesitant, since she’s got a prison record and it’s also kinda weird that he’s asking and not Ann.

And this reminds Alan Parker that yeah, wait, this is kinda weird and way overstepping for a daughter who’s out of her teenage years and hasn’t particularly asked about help finding a job. And when he notices he forgot his phone he rushes home and tries explaining, first, he just forgot his phone, it happens, and second, he was only trying to do something nice for Ann, whom he loves and who’s been so supportive through a lousy time. He opens up about how he’s felt now that everyone sees him as helpless and it puts me in mind of how excellently Marciuliano has written parents and how they feel their positions changing in Sally Forth. And this sort of exploration of a mood works more naturally with the Judge Parker style of set-a-scene-then-jump-three-months. (And is similar to how Sally Forth has explored changing identity, obscured by shifting between different themes for the week.) I want more of this, more stuff with feeling. But for now I’m just waiting for …

Next Week!

And a fresh Popeye-a-palooza, since besides Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye we’ve also got a story going in Milholland’s Thimble Theater (Popeye Without Olive) and in Marcus Williams’s Eye Lie Popeye, plus more!