Penny and Aggie/Recap/What You Can't Teach

"Defeat them with a song in our heart...and a smile on our face."

This three-strip interlude, originally published as a bonus story in a print collection of the comic, sheds light on what made Aggie the person she is today. Aggie, as a young child, finds a dead bird and asks her mother, Melody, how a good God can let bad things like that happen. Melody says that as God has tried to learn from his mistakes as an angry and jealous deity and become a God of love, so does he hope that we'll learn, from our mistakes and from the world's "cruelties large and small," how to defeat injustice, as she and Nick try to do with their activism. The last lines of her homily are juxtaposed with an image of Nick and thirteen-year-old Aggie in the wake of Melody's fatal car accident ("large"), and with a Flash Back to the very first strip, in which Aggie sees Penny snobbishly dismiss Helen ("small"). Aggie is about to react in anger when, recalling Melody's words about fighting injustice "with a smile," she smirks, presumably in preparation for wisecracking. This look at the beginning of the title characters' rivalry suggests that Aggie has taken her mother's words to heart, if not entirely in the way Melody intended.

Tropes

 * Call Back: To the very first comic.
 * Death By Origin Story: A non-Superhero instance, in that Melody's death, and Aggie's desire to live by her values as she understands them, was the major factor in creating Aggie as we know her. Resurfaces, in a different way, in Suspicious Minds.
 * Death Is a Sad Thing
 * Dramatically Missing the Point: Aggie misinterprets Melody's talk of fighting "small cruelties" "with a smile on our face" to justify mocking Penny for being (as she sees her) an Alpha Bitch.
 * God Is Flawed: Melody views the supposed dichotomy between the "Old Testament" and "New Testament" deity as God trying to learn from his mistakes.
 * The Snark Knight: Why Aggie became one.
 * Whole-Episode Flashback