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While we wait for something even vaguely interesting to happen in the current Mary Worth storyline, let’s take a trip in the wayback machine to 1980. Faithful reader Andrew Leal shared with me some scanned strips from the closing days of the Carter Administration that first introduced us to everybody’s favorite grandstanding oddball, Ian Cameron, and his wife/arm candy Toby. This first strip presages his arrival at Charterstone, proving that Mary has always been a hateful xenophobe who thinks names such as “Ian Cameron” somehow qualify as “exotic.”

Now that you’re almost engaged, Sara, talking to another man would obviously make you a hussy, so it’s best if you don’t serve as Ian’s guide. You should put on your burqa and go back to the women’s chambers in your father’s condo instead.

Sometime later, Toby Cameron related to her new home’s resident meddler just how she and her husband met. He was drunk, obviously.

It’s interesting that Toby was apparently once some kind of artist slumming around the Village in New York. I guess it’s true that inside every creative hipster bohemian, there’s a tracksuit-clad, dead-eyed trophy wife who does nothing all day but gossip with women twice her age trying to get out.

Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the man himself.

So, yeah, he’s pretty much always been a prick. They seem to have toned down the drinking a bit, though. And made him a bit less leonine.

Also, since any discussion of the Camerons’ love life is enough to turn you off heterosexuality altogether: I’ve been meaning for a while to link to faithful reader Alex Blaze’s excellent Qomics for Queers blog. What I did for the Rex and Troy storyline in Rex Morgan he does for … well, pretty much all comics, basically.