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Mary Worth, 4/27/07

WOO-HOO, VON’S HERE, YEAH! And he’s … well, he’s kind of underwhelming, actually. Typical boring WASPy Mary Worth dude. More intriguing is Vera’s immediate deployment of karate moves against him — she’s clearly been taking classes in physical and emotional self-defense. Also, now that Vera’s had dinner with Mary and received the old biddy’s tentative stamp of approval, she’s permitted call upon the creepy, silent cast of Charterstone extras for protection. Von’s right to cower; the close-mouthed creeps will shuffle at him wordlessly and then smother him with their poorly drawn hands unless Vera calls them off.

Dennis the Menace, 4/27/07

It’s also possible that George has just quietly died sitting up. In which case Dennis wouldn’t be so much “menacing” as “creepily affectless.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/27/07

So here’s an odd little story: faithful reader Bob Byrd actually forwarded this strip to me a week ago. Apparently it appeared in place of Tank McNamera on the Yahoo comics page last Wednesday, which is pretty bizarre because the two strips are handled by different syndicates and Yahoo doesn’t even carry Rex Morgan. You’ll note that this is not the usual King Features in-house coloring job: the color palette is more muted, the flesh tones more realistic, and there’s not a bit of electric blue in sight. The graphic is also bigger than what King usually syndicates.

Anyway, it’s been fun sitting on this for a week and watching the strip feebly setting up Rex as having something like a shred of integrity, since I knew he would throw his highfalutin’ moral qualms to the wind as soon as he got rubbed the wrong way by some rich Brit. The good Dr. Morgan is a pillar of the community and he’ll thank you not to forget it; he doesn’t like being treated like a common chauffeur even if he shows up at the airport with a sign bearing the name of his passenger and doesn’t identify who exactly he is. Rex doesn’t really care about his friendship with Heather or even his stock portfolio, but treat him like the hired help and he will fuck you up — in this case, by driving you around reeeeaaal slow-like, which should be thrilling to watch.

Gil Thorp, 4/27/07

Oh man, not only does Clambake have vaguely obscene batting advice to offer, but vaguely obscene pitching advice as well! Yes, Mark’s big hands will be perfect — especially the left one, with its long, pretty fingernails.

It’s interesting to note that, while it took months of hectoring from the stands to get Lisa Wyche’s mom an unpaid position as an assistant coach for the girl’s basketball team, Coach Thorp has pretty much handed over his team to this deranged old coot in only the second week of practice. Gil is presumably hanging out under the bleachers smoking a joint or something while Otha Yancy holds hands with his pitching staff.

(By the way, unbelievably only one person has purchased Clambake gear so far. WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE? HE’S CLAMBAKE, FOR GOD’S SAKE! CLAMBAKE!!!!)

DIck Tracy, 4/27/07

That look of bug-eyed ecstasy in panel three comes from the feeling of climax that America’s greatest detective only gets from killing a perp with his bare hands. (The stiff, uplifted angle of his tie is suggestive here.) You might think that falling head-first into a smokestack and presumably being scalded to death is a particularly convoluted and gruesome way to go, and you’d be right, but you have to keep in mind that Dick Tracy has been leaving a trail of villainous corpses in his wake for 130 years or however long he’s been in the newspaper, and it’s hard to not repeat yourself. This is a strip that, in its first appearance in this blog, featured a pair of folks dying as a flaming wind generator plummeted to the ground, so expect the bizarre.

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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.