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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.

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Mary Worth, 4/22/07

You know, I will defend at great length the entertainment value to be found in Mary Worth, but I have to admit that a significant amount of its content essentially consists of small-minded upper-middle-class suburban white people gossiping about each other. I’m somewhat horrified but not entirely surprised that Toby and Mary immediately go from “man trouble” to “married.” “Vera didn’t say she had been married,” Mary noted as she tapped her coffee cup against her teeth, “but I have to assume that she was, since her problems seem to involve a man and she never mentioned that she was a whore.”

Spider-Man, 4/22/07

It’s a well-known fact that the only bit of wit or verve you will encounter in the newspaper strip version of the Spider-Man franchise lies in the overwrought NEXT! boxes at the end of the Sunday strips. Based on today’s, I hope that an angry Kordok will ultimately throttle this flat-topped turncoat until his misshapen head bursts like an enormous zit.

Sally Forth, 4/22/07

The signs are all there, so we might as well just lay back and enjoy it: Sally Forth is slowly but surely turning into a non-stop fuckathon.

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Curtis, 4/21/07

Congrats to Curtis for making the unpopular assertion that looks and surface appearances do matter. Although this strip doesn’t really seem to have any context to speak of (it’s not like Curtis and his dad were talking about the way those “rap” “artists” dress or anything), it’s good to see someone bucking against the PC “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” orthodoxy.

By the way, I’m pretty sure the fact that the elder Wilkins is drinking out of that prissy little teacup means that he’s on the “down low.”

Update: I can’t believe I almost let slip this opportunity to link to faithful reader Maughta’s blog, Judge a Book by its Cover. Basically, what I do to comics, she does to the covers of paperback novels.

Blondie, 4/21/07

I’ve never given a lot of thought to where exactly it is that the Bumsteads live. I guess I’ve always had the idea that it was somewhere suburban and bucolic. But now that I know that nighttime in their neighborhood is ruled by roaming, unfenced packs of hungry, semi-feral dogs, I might have to rethink some of my assumptions.

Mark Trail, 4/21/07

Wait … Mark returned to the inside of his beehive (note the freaky honeycomb wall design) and just left Dan and Sally “in the hands of” the private employees of a private company, who lack the power to detain or arrest? Does he think they’re just going to patiently wait there for their fate after the horror of being found out by the great Mark Trail?

Actually, they probably will. When Mark Trail punches you, you stay punched.

Mary Worth, 4/21/07

A few people have complained that I didn’t mention Mary Worth this week; this is because I found her dinner with Vera to be crushingly boring (yes, I realize that this is how normal people react to any arbitrarily chosen five days of this strip, but still). This opinion was solidified by the fact that Vera revealed essentially nothing, not even in her thought balloons, so I have no idea what exactly Mary’s so excited about in panel three. The only thing the introverted Ms. Shields mentioned that caught Mary’s attention was that she had a nanny as a girl, so I’m assuming that Mary now thinks that she must be rich and plans on murdering her and stealing her hidden gold.

I’m pretty sure that the dude wandering by in the hallway is Wilbur Weston, desperate for strip time, wearing a baseball hat and a fake mustache.

Crankshaft, 4/21/07

I think I might actually like Crankshaft the strip (if not Crankshaft the person) better if he actually did start clubbing people to death. With an iron bludgeon shaped like a human hand. He’d start with with people who talk out of turn during Garden Club. So watch yourself, ladies.

Unrelated Pibgorn update: Brooke McEldowney has started a LiveJournal blog which will keep you posted on the strip’s new home, once it finds one. There’s an interesting discussion of the editorial back and forth with his previous syndicate, and, in executive summary, the new Pibgorn’s gonna be filthy.