Pretty much everything around the end of Bloom County. Opus' dandelion gardens are destroyed and paved over, everyone has left the comic, and the final panel of the last page is Opus slowly walking away alone into a blank nothingness as his fruit hat falls apart.
Ronald-Ann's home life is an ongoing tearjerker. She lives in poverty in a squalid, crime-infested city neighborhood, which shocks Opus, Mortimer, and Tim W. Forty. In one strip, she writes a letter to Michael Jackson after learning that the star bought the Elephant Man's skeleton, offering to sell him Opus' skeleton so that her neighborhood could afford heating oil. In another strip, she tells Trump!Bill about the hunger, poverty, and overcrowding that characterize her home life.
Trump!Bill: My Palm Beach cottage has 118 rooms. How many rooms does your cottage have?
Ronald-Ann: One. But we have nine beds! Reynelda here sleeps in a soup box.
Trump!Bill: I have a $100 million boat. Do you have a boat?
Ronald-Ann: When the plumbing breaks, our sofa floats!
Trump!Bill: I have a dream, a dream that one day I might get six points on margin for the Eiffel Tower deal. What do you dream about?
Ronald-Ann: Dinner.
Ronald-Ann's mother is rarely around, and her father isn't part of her life. In one strip, Ronald-Ann is alone in her apartment, calling Dial-a-Mom so she'll have someone to talk to.
Ronald-Ann: Is this Dial-a-Mom?
Woman: Yes, but don't you have a mother?
Ronald-Ann: Yes, but she's in gym class at the moment.
Woman: Do you have a father?
Ronald-Ann: I have Reynelda. She doesn't have a head.
Woman: I'm sorry to hear that.
Ronald-Ann: Can I talk to a mom? Uh, my Visa Gold Card has expired.
The story where Opus comes within a hair's breadth of seeing his mother again... only to be dragged away in an ensuing firefight between the Mary Kay Commandos and an extremist PETA-like group.
A strip has Oliver Wendell Jones ruining people's sense of wonderment with cold, hard facts. Mostly funny, until he tells the sick son about how all dragonflies die eventually. The boy is heartbroken and Oliver realizes he took it too far (even Steve says so).
This comic drawn after the 2018 Parkland High School shooting. Count the dandelions...
comic drawn after the 2018 Parkland High School shooting. Count the dandelions...