Whew! A metric buttload of comics paid tribute to Earth Day on 22 April, some well, and some not-so-well. Mary Worth even interrupted an explosive confrontation between Adrian Cory and her fiance’ Ted to honor the planet. Nevertheless, Mary is an avid tree-hugger (as long as there’s no messy bark or sticky sap), and she recycled the Earth Day strip for the next day’s news. Way to save the planet, Mare!
Here I was, doing a one-time funny with wacky, wacky road-rage possessed drivers. Hey, it’s funny, and it’s a one shot deal. Right?
Oh, how wrong I was!
Will the treachery of Ted never end? His grandiose plans are falling apart — or are they? Were they a clever ruse to flim-flam the Cory clan? Oh, yeah — who cares?
Ted’s turn of phrase called up a plethora of 80s music fans at Comics Curmudgeon, no doubt distracting the moon-struck Adrian. Second only to this was the mysterious shading on Ted’s face, an unmistakable harbinger of doom (or merely pointing to the fact that Ted is a messy, messy eater). CC’s One-Eyed Wolfdog bemoaned the fact that if Ted does something weird, like change into a wolf, it had better not end up with a wolf in tweed clothing and a stupid pencil mustache.
But to paraphrase Chinatown: “Forget it, Wolfdog. It’s Charterstone.”
aka, Quit Feeding Me Straight Lines!
There’s nothing quite like a comic strip that has its titular character MIA (well, aside from Garfield, Marvin, Edison Lee, Ziggy…). Mary Worth has been cooling her heels at the Charterstone pool, it seems, while Adrian and her fiance Ted are hashing things out about the upcoming nuptials. Aside from some money problems, things look all rosy, just in time for a spring wedding!
Or do they? This is Mary Worth, after all.
…but it’s not like the characters in Mary Worth are living through anything but the mid-20th Century. No, Jeff isn’t under any moral or monetary responsibility to help out his daughter with the wedding, but you just know he’d blow a gasket if he weren’t invited to walk his little angel down the aisle.
Oh, wait. Go With a WINNER! Ah, that’s better!
The current Mary Worth story-line is boring me to tears. College-grad medical doctor Adrian is apparently being sucked in by a flim-flam artist and doesn’t see it. (Then again, Rex Morgan is an M.D., too, and there are whole forests of 2×4’s with his his name written on them.)
I pass the time hoping that grifter Ted and griftee Toby meet up. It’s not going to happen, but a girl can dream…
It looks like the die has been cast. The fat lady is warming up. The Zamboni is idling. Yes, the long program is finally here in the Mary Worth ice-skating extravaganza…a mere four minutes on the ice, and we’ll know if Lynn Griffin and her pony-tail are the champions her trophy-driven father envisions, or just another wannabe whose childhood and adolescence has been squandered for little more than a constant set of chilblains.
What the hell are chilblains, anyway?
I like figure-skating. I like it even better when skaters use out-of-the-ordinary music (Michelle Kwan using Loreena McKenitt’s Dante’s Prayer; that cute Paul guy using Patrick Doyle’s Henry V soundtrack). There’s a lot of music out there.
The conversation between Mary Worth and Lynn the Promising Figure-Skater has ended!
On deck for the next three weeks: the conversation between Mary Worth and Frank the Pushy Stage-Father!
Be still my heart. Well, that won’t be too hard…
The framing leaves something to be desired, but hey, we’re not here to hear Mary talk, are we? Thanks to Dub Not Dubya from the Comics Curmudgeon boards for the inspiration!
