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Stupid real work is forcing me to postpone doing today’s comics until tomorrow at some point; however, to show that I love you, my faithful readers, I offer a couple of points of interest.

First, in a comment faithful reader Jed Dougherty pointed us in the direction of some more old-school Mary Worth art. Jed says:

If I recall correctly, [Ian] started as a caricature of the Mary Worth background artist Bill Ziegler, who was assisting on the strip in the 70s. To add insult to injury, Ziegler took over drawing the characters in the 80s and had to draw a caricature of himself as a pompous ass.

He also provides a link to a site selling some Ziegler-era MW (scroll down or search on “Mary Worth”). Here’s a taste:

Also worthy of note is this wide-ranging interview with Curtis author Ray Billingsley, sent to me by faithful reader Quacks Like A Duck. Fun facts: Billingsley’s been cartooning since he was a teenager, and at 16 was in Will Eisner’s class at the New York School of Visual Arts with Patrick McDonnell of Mutts. Also, his now-legendary balloon suicide cartoon was banned in Boston, baby.

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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.