I kind of wish there were some material between Sal’s dumping and the last story of the semester just to give Danny some actual time to repair himself.  Without that buffer, everyone seems a little too alarmist.  The story worked better at the time because this was the first few pages of a new comic book, so there was this unstated period of time passing between the previous material and this new stuff.  Just… imagine there were a few weeks of story between there, somewhere.  Probably with more madcap Joyce-is-a-stalker hijinks.