Comment of the Week

My little friend is not so little anymore, Toby! In fact, she's quite large! Enormous, in fact! Nine foot six and getting taller by the day! It's actually quite alarming! We're getting into I'm a Virgo territory here! Did you watch that miniseries, by the way? It was on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago! Jharrel Jerome is a treasure! Some great performances by Elijah Wood and Walton Goggins as well, which reminds me that I need to start my Justified rewatch. Oh, Margo Martindale is another treasure, especially as a voice in BoJack Horseman. Anyway, Olive is a giant, is the point I'm trying to make.

els

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FOLKS! This month’s Internet Read Aloud is happening tonight, in the city of Los Angeles, California! Got a fun lineup and the price literally cannot be beat (unless someone is paying you to go to their comedy show, and which seems like madness).

Here is the link to the Facebook event! Please come if you are able, I promise you’ll have a good time!

To tide you over, laff-wise, here is this week’s comment of the week!

“Just look at those kids. They’re thinking ‘Outside? What’s that?’” –Lord Flatulence

And here are the very funny runners up!

“Don’t worry, Trixie! Thanks to the miracle of modern science, this food is so utterly processed and packed with preservatives that the ants wouldn’t touch it, anyway! WE’RE FIXING ALL OF GOD’S MISTAKES! ISN’T IT WONDERFUL??” –Dunkelcopter

“For a brief shining moment I thought the last panel might be a written apology.” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“I’m still stuck on how to complete the sentence ‘When Wilbur and Dawn eat together…’ Best I’ve got so far is ‘no one goes away hungry — except emotionally.’” –Peanut Gallery

“C’mon, Sarge, let the soldiers go inside! They’ve finished their raking task so effectively that the ground has been cleared of all objects, natural or man-made! Any more and they’ll be raking down to the sub-atomic level!” –Thelonious_Nick

“The Mary Worth Universe feels much more alive and real if we know that even when Wilbur is off-panel he keeps fucking everything up.” –Ettorre

“Dad, I’m just gonna stop you right there. When I say ‘How are things with you, Dad?’, I mean, ‘How’s work?’ or ‘Done any good karaoke lately?’ I do not — and I mean this sincerely — want to hear anything, anything at all, about your love life. Anything. In fact, I don’t want to hear about you at all. Or look at you. Listen, I’m just gonna keep talking about myself as I spoon broccoli into my mouth, ‘kay? Great.” –els

“‘Have you heard from Sam?’ ‘No. I think we both need a little space right now. That’s why I bought another 1,300 acres. Is the real estate lawyer here?’” –pastordan

“Ah, Dawn, if nothing else is redeeming about you, your shade game is strong: ‘Well, of course, Stella wants a break from you … but my situation is totally different. I’m me! I didn’t expect anyone would want to get away from me!’” –Dread

“Blondie editors cropped out a message urging fans to make and post pics of their own special Dagwood pancakes after being unable to find a satisfactory hashtags (rejecting #dagjacks and a portmanteau of Bumstead and pancakes, #bumcakes, which was too prone to autocorrect).” –Frissen Frassen Russen Mussen

“The lying didn’t come BEFORE the eyeing, the lying was a defense mechanism brought on by the decrying of the eyeing. If Jared hadn’t been publicly mortifying about the eyeing, there’d have been no need for lying. And don’t even get me started on the spying.” –MKay

“It looks like Wilbur is laser focused on drinking out of that cup. Dawn does not appear confident he will succeed.” –Kevin On Earth

“‘Oh, you think the names Jack and Jill are inherently funny, do you? What’s your name, sir?’ ‘Funky Winkerbean.’ ‘Get out.’” –Banana Jr. 6000

“Doesn’t the annuity/long-term care salesman usually spring for a meal at a swanky bistro to draw suckers, ahem, potential clients into the presentation? [slaps forehead] But of course — this is Westview and the only available venue would have been Montoni’s. Carry on, Glengarry Man!” –But What Do I Know?

“In Wilbur’s memory, his past partners look at him with an expression that is best described as ‘grudging tolerance,’ and that yet it’s still clear that’s a step or twelve above how they actually viewed him.” –Conynaut

“Gotta love the little ‘service entry’ translation at the bottom of the third panel. As if the reader is supposed to think, ‘Oh, wow! They have service entries on the moon! They’re so like us in so many ways!’” –Joe Blevins

“The extent to which Zak, without even trying, left an open wound of emasculation across Wilbur’s psyche that will never begin to heal is why Zak is the best Mary Worth character, even when off-camera for years at a time. I hope this plot ends with him looking up the pay of the average tech CEO and the average local advice columnist and realizing how optimistic ‘twice my salary’ was.” –Dan

“What I’m saying Dawn is that if you were a hot lady, you could get a guy, maybe even one with money.” –Little Blue Bicycle

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Dick Tracy, 8/5/22

Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that Marina did end up throwing herself at Detective Tracy, sexually, but don’t worry: his sense of loyalty to his wife and revulsion at interplanetary miscegenation meant that he spurned her advances so he could do what actually turns him on: detective work wearing a hilariously pointless disguise. If I were one of only three or four humans in an underground Antarctic city, I might be less than confident that just covering my face was enough to ensure anonymity, especially since nobody with Lunarian antennae could properly wear that hood. I’m not the world’s greatest detective, though, so what do I know?

Hi and Lois, 8/5/22

I gotta say, as running gags go, “Chip and his friend in the sailor cap try to break out of their suffocating risk-free suburban lifestyle but have no real idea how to do it” isn’t the worst that Hi and Lois can do. Certainly better than “Trixie thinks she’s friends with the sun” or “Dot and Ditto just aren’t very smart” or the other usual fare we get here.

Mary Worth, 8/5/22

“So I get my full appearance fee? Even if I just appear in a thought balloon? Well, I guess that’s OK then”: What I’m assuming Iris said to Mary Worth management, based on her facial expression here.

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OK, fine, it looks like this is “one of those weeks” on this blog — you know, the kind of week where I just kind of end up talking about Mary Worth every day — so to mix things up a bit (and set the stage for today’s strip) I want to take you on a Mary Worth history deep dive, thanks to some strips posted to Twitter by the invaluable Pangent Technologies last August when I was on vacation and didn’t have a chance to post them here. They’re from 1993 and they cover Wilbur’s arrival in the strip! Are you intrigued? Well you should be! Because before Wilbur got to Charterstone, when all anybody knew about him was that he had eliminated one of the two kitchens in his apartment (????), Toby thought that maybe … he was hot?

Mary Worth, 4/1/93

Whoops, sorry, Toby! Turns out he’s Wilbur.

Mary Worth, 4/16/93

Ian’s cruel smile in the second panel is truly one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. This is what it looks like when your biggest success story of the week is that the guy your wife was fantasizing about cucking you with turns out to be an uggo.

But don’t worry, Ian’s distaste for Wilbur hasn’t been lessened by this victory. He’s particularly horrified to learn that Wilbur had to give up his job as a sports writer and take on the mantle of “Ask Wendy” for financial reasons, presumably because feminism triumphed and there’s no money in masculine pursuits anymore.

Mary Worth, 5/5, 5/6, and 5/8/93

Oh, also, it turns out that Wilbur is moving into this sad condo complex because he’s divorced.

Mary Worth, 4/20/93

Wilbur rightfully knows that he can’t show further weakness in front of Charterstone’s alpha male, but he later confides in Mary that both his ex and his daughter voted him into homelessness:

Mary Worth, 5/18-19/93

ANYWAY! Dawn eventually came around on the whole “living with Wilbur” issue, possibly because she wanted to move to California or maybe live with a parent who lets her indulge her worst impulses. But what about her mom?

Mary Worth, 8/4/22

Today we get the first glimpse (that I can remember) of Wilbur’s ex-wife, or at least his current internal vision of her: an icy, patrician blonde, who wears pearls as a matter of course and who definitely only lost interest in Wilbur because he lost interest in her first, because she was obsessed with raising her social standing in “high society” while Wilbur wanted to do fun, cool Wilbur stuff. Anyway, the look Dawn is giving him is saying “I definitely have never heard this side of this story and if I sit here very still maybe I won’t have to answer any questions about whether or not I believe it.”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/4/22

Look, I get it, it can be pretty traumatizing to realize that all the characters in your long-running comic strip have evolved slowly over the years to become really unsympathetic assholes. But have you considered maybe … making them act less like that? Because I’m not sure that “have everyone else in the strip acknowledge that these people are really, thoroughly exhausting to deal with on every level” is a “solution” to the problem per se.