Mary Worth Readers Are Serious About This Stuff

January 15, 2022 6:37 PM

The Mary Worth comment board is unhinged and, frankly, a little frightening. “Honestly, the fervency of their devotion to this comic strip is impressive, and we should all wish for this kind of action.”
posted by marxchivist (67 comments total)

Wilbur is the gift that keeps on giving.
posted by drezdn at 6:45 PM on January 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

Ohhhh, this reminds me of the For Better or For Worse LiveJournal snark back in the day! I enjoyed it SO MUCH! This was in the last days of original FBOFW, after Lynn Johnston had totally snapped after her divorce and she was absolutely hellbent on forcing Elizabeth to marry (Gr)anthony, her high school boyfriend who had married and procreated with another woman who *gasp* didn't actually want kids. Elizabeth got assaulted at work and Granthony (who had prematurely aged in this strip) had to come to her rescue, and both of her other, nicer boyfriends/exes were revealed to be cheaters, so she HAD to move home and marry Granthony. Oh, the horror. Oh, the snark. Added other snark: John's train fixation, the son's bad novel that he ran into a burning building to save. April was the only bearable one left and at least it looks like she made it out.

I bowed out after the "new-runs" started, because who gives a crap. But I get this urge, even if the 2 second actions of Mary Worth never caught on with me.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:57 PM on January 15, 2022 [18 favorites]

Window eels!
posted by brainwane at 6:58 PM on January 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

OMG jenfullmoon, I haven't thought about the extremely passionate FBOFW discussions on LJ in years. I was reading this article like "man, a time honored tradition, snarking on newspaper comics on the internet, I feel like everyone was doing this back in the day, good to see there are people still out there practicing the old traditions" but yes FBOFW on LJ was next level shit. For a minute it felt like everyone was starting a blog to make fun of the comics.
posted by potrzebie at 7:01 PM on January 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Shaenon K. Garrity on For Better Or For Worse in 2006: "Anthony represents the death of youthful dreams."

The Comics Curmudgeon on recent Mary Worth strips.
posted by brainwane at 7:04 PM on January 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

Poor Estelle. I am not looking forward to trying to date at her age, if Wilbur is the best she can do.

I was frankly pretty awestruck that they were killing off Wilbur in front of God and everybody. Thirty years ago, Gary Larson had to fight tooth and nail to put in the slightest bit of edge, and now there’s this.* Wilbur sucks, but it’s a really brutal way to go that (unlike the late Aldo Kelrast) he didn’t really have coming. At least one person has survived a cruise ship fall that I’m aware of, but mostly they don’t.

*Along with whatever the hell is going on with 9 Chickweed Lane. I haven’t looked at it in months but I am sure it is still gross.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:18 PM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

The worst part of this is that I'm now sucked in and want to know what happens next. It's very sad.
posted by Well I never at 7:23 PM on January 15, 2022 [18 favorites]

The prospect of falling overboard is one of the many reasons I do not regard cruises to be vacations.

See previous discussion of cruise ship disappearances.
posted by Anonymous at 7:50 PM on January 15, 2022

I've been sucked into this strip for longer than I care to admit. In Pre-Covid times (I told you it was a long time) I met the artist for this strip at a comic convention and in good humor told her I had been sucked into the strip. She laughed and told me that meant she was doing her job.
posted by marxchivist at 7:57 PM on January 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

This article is GOLD. And now I, too, kind of want to know what happens next.

Ryan Bradford’s recollections of how satisfying it was to read the comics section as a child mirror mine. Especially this bit:

Then there were the comics that I passed right over, the serials: Prince Valiant, Rex Morgan M.D. and especially Mary Worth. In the case of Mary Worth, it felt like someone imagined the exact opposite of what would appeal to an elementary school-aged boy and turned it into a comic. They—and by “they” I mean Big Comics—would’ve had a better reaction if they just scanned my homework straight into the funny pages.

posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:08 PM on January 15, 2022 [12 favorites]

MetaFilter: Let’s just pause right here to congratulate me on being a really cool human being.
posted by glonous keming at 8:34 PM on January 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

Counterpoint:

MetaFilter: The worst part of this is that I'm now sucked in and want to know what happens next. It's very sad.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:42 PM on January 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

The Comics Curmudgeon on recent Mary Worth strips.

Off-topic but oh my god that McGruff the Crime Dog song is amazing.
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:47 PM on January 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

The Captain and crew forget to check the camera footage as they are distracted by a new online word game.

Estelle discovers that Wilbur’s luggage contains 2cwt of iron chains, padlocks and a freshly inked insurance policy for his INSERT NAME HERE wife.

On a distant jungle island a chant rises, “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Wilbur R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!”

NOW, READ ON…
posted by fallingbadgers at 9:08 PM on January 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

I hope that Wilbur returns, eye-patched and bearded, as the leader of a group of Sargasso pirates, thus setting up a Mary Worth/ Rex Morgan/ Terry and the Pirates super crossover event.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 9:11 PM on January 15, 2022 [17 favorites]

I hate a fictional character! And when I realize that that’s where I’m at in life—hating an illustration—it makes me hate Wilbur even more.

I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. My god do I ever want to start reading this "comic" strip. I always thought that Mary Worth was a Murder She Wrote sort - an elderly lady who solved crimes. Now that I know who she really is and what the strip is about, hell yes.
posted by the webmistress at 9:24 PM on January 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Also https://twitter.com/WilburWurthless
posted by the webmistress at 9:36 PM on January 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Off-topic but oh my god that McGruff the Crime Dog song is amazing.

Continuing the derail, "Alcohol" on the same album is a great Steely Dan pastiche (for certain values of the word "great", but I think my enjoyment is at least half earnest at this point). Certified Yacht Rock, too.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 10:04 PM on January 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Well, at least it's not Cathy.

Or Zombie Cathy.

Then again, what's the difference?
posted by y2karl at 10:32 PM on January 15, 2022

Oh, hey, Gerrity, I haven’t reread Narbonic for a while.

(Whistling past Mary Worth, here. Some people, they go in, they don’t come out. Or they don’t come out like they went in. You visit Mary Worth, she keeps something.)
posted by clew at 10:38 PM on January 15, 2022

This is incredible. Is a Mary Worth Fanfare page next?
posted by Monochrome at 10:58 PM on January 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Don't miss the "live action" Mary Worth adaptations!
posted by boilermonster at 11:22 PM on January 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don’t see any results for tag ‘maryworth’ on Fanfare, but you might enjoy the inaugural episode of the Metafilter Comics Digest podcast (2011).
posted by Callisto Prime at 11:23 PM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

The embed on that page isn't working for me, boilermonster, but here's the full-length version of that masterful Mary Worth reenactment.
posted by mumkin at 11:34 PM on January 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

masterful Mary Worth reenactment

I always imagined Mary Worth as existing in a John Waters high-camp universe, but the industrial rumble going on in the background really makes a case for it being more of a Lynchian suburban purgatory.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:26 AM on January 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

You see, in my timestream, I only knew of Mary—... are you sure this isn't some sort electronic copy of MAD Magazine?
posted by not_on_display at 1:20 AM on January 16, 2022

Next we can expect a grimdark rebirth in the Marvell Cinematic Universe.

Oh wait, wrong comic… would it be DC?
posted by nickggully at 4:02 AM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

And Dave Hill brings up a good point about the “Buy Print” option on Comics Kingdom. I, for one, would probably benefit from a Wilburp print to commemorate this high-point in my life.
Framed posters of Wilbur's plunge into the ocean are now available from Comics Kingdom for $72.00(!) And his death hasn't even been confirmed yet. Really puts that Spider-Man panel into perspective now, doesn't it?
posted by dannyboybell at 4:27 AM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

+1 for "window eels"
posted by chavenet at 4:35 AM on January 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is the comics. If we haven't seen the body, he's not dead.
posted by synecdoche at 4:36 AM on January 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

Oh my gosh! My mom and I used to read MW. Years ago. I had forgotten all about the strip. Thanks!
posted by manageyourexpectations at 8:00 AM on January 16, 2022

I was stunned to see a Robyn Hitchcock quote in the last comic, since it seemed inappropriately contemporary for such a stodgy old soap opera.

Then I realized how odd it is to think that a musician from the 70s is "too contemporary" for a comic from the 30s. It's all primordial ooze at this point.
posted by panglos at 9:09 AM on January 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

NoRealPeopleInvolvedFilter
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:30 AM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Along with whatever the hell is going on with 9 Chickweed Lane. I haven’t looked at it in months but I am sure it is still gross.

Ugh, 9CL. When last I looked everyone in it seemed to have oddly specific exhibitionist fetishes and was way way too hung up on them. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum but it all seemed profoundly unhealthy.
posted by jackbishop at 10:41 AM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've never heard of the strip before, but that article and the included quotes are amazing.
posted by starfishprime at 10:43 AM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I agree some of those comments are unfairly fixated in Wilbur's physical appearance, when his personality flaws are such better targets for ridicule.

Bradford's summary of what's been going on skips over the part where Wilbur decides to adopt a dog, because "dogs are chick magnets," then because the dog does not immediately warm to him, somehow foists the dog onto Estelle.
posted by RobotHero at 10:54 AM on January 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

...And then gets pet fish, stares at them longingly, and names them Willa and Stellan.

(I didn't actually remember their names. I looked it up. And in so doing came across this discussion from Women Write About Comics, and a surprising number of similar links I didn't actually follow.)

I think the Comics Curmudgeon crowd is probably much better about the body-shaming stuff - Josh does, or used to do, some moderation iirc - though I don't always read the comments there so I can't guarantee it.
posted by trig at 12:31 PM on January 16, 2022

Mary Worth appeared in our newspaper back in the sixties. I used to like running through the funnies, in colour on Saturday (or was it Sunday?) and black and white the rest of the week. Most of the comic strips worked fine, like Blondie, because they were one off gags that six year old me could giggle at. But Mary Worth? Incomprehensible talking heads. I would read them because at that age I was unable to not read anything that was thrust in front of me, but I had no idea what the plot ever was, or why the people in the strip were so intense when nothing ever happened.

Until one day, the current male lead in the strip was tied up, in a barn, and someone had just heated up a horseshoe red hot and was about to put both his eyes out with it.

Oh boy, THEN I was interested in following the strip! Was I ever! Alas, if we got three newspapers a week it was rather more than average. Many weeks we didn't get a paper at all. So while I DIVED on the very next newspaper that came into the house.... I never did find out what happened, who anyone was, or what was going on...

Ever since then any time I looked at the Mary Worth comic it was the same adult talking heads discussing something incomprehensible. Tch. Not fair. I am going to die with my life incomplete, never knowing if the guy was rescued or something utterly gruesome occurred.
posted by Jane the Brown at 12:45 PM on January 16, 2022 [15 favorites]

I'm surprised that no one's mentioned Funky Winkerbean yet. Maybe all these strips are starting to get into dark, baroque storylines because far fewer people read the newspaper, so the strip writers are going ever deeper into the weeds to keep the readers that they still have.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:20 PM on January 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

From the WWAC link: Wilbur is Comic Twitter’s Wicker Man. The next harvest will not fail!

Funky Winkerbean's been mining the depths of misery in the name of Art for well over a decade (probably much longer). But I do think there's probably been some realization that a fair percentage of strip followers these days are also Comics Curmudgeon readers who read the strips for a somewhat different reason than traditional readers.

As for holding on to readers, it's been a recurring thing that every once in a while some newspaper (or, gasp - syndicate) will move to drop some truly terrible, boring strip, and there'll be a gigantic outpouring of shock and outrage that will cause the insensitive publishers to reconsider. It's really something

I would read them because at that age I was unable to not read anything that was thrust in front of me, but I had no idea what the plot ever was, or why the people in the strip were so intense when nothing ever happened.

This is the thing that always gets me! These strips are so bad - the art, the writing, the humor. They so deeply embody the opposite of excellence that it's stunning. But when you're a kid you assume there must be something there that you're not getting. Surely adults wouldn't pay to run pure mediocre crap in newspapers every day, right? There must be some merit in them? Growing up is all about making sense of the world, trying to get the pieces to fit together under a set of basic assumptions. As you get older you start to realize that some of those assumptions will never let the pieces fit. Making sense of the comics page is a process of coming to terms with the fact that a lot of the arrangement of the world is just pretty lousy, after all.
posted by trig at 1:40 PM on January 16, 2022 [12 favorites]

Someone’s eyes being put out by the heated ends of a horseshoe! Holy shit, that’s macabre!

And here I thought Zippy was weird.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 1:54 PM on January 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

I used to see a newspaper with a comics section once a week and I marveled how I could still easily follow the plot of "Mary Worth". And even once a week I questioned why I was reading something so boring and pointless. Then Mary got a face-lift and the new writer started coming up with much stranger plotlines, and now we are here, in a place where we are all united in joyously celebrating the possibility that Wilbur is dead! I guess COVID and the Death of Democracy has broken us. Or else the sheer mediocrity of most daily comics has got us craving excitement.

[crosses fingers that Wilbur is really dead, or at least has to fight monkeys for coconuts on a desert island]
posted by acrasis at 1:54 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am going to die with my life incomplete, never knowing if the guy was rescued or something utterly gruesome occurred.

Jane the Brown, Mary Worth and Me might be interested in tracking that one down...
posted by trig at 1:57 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

how I could still easily follow the plot of "Mary Worth".

This reminds me of reading an article about the early days of General Hospital, in which they assumed people only watched the show once a week, so it was slow and they were constantly having people go out for cups of coffee to recap what had gone on. The actors were very bored.

I have never been able to follow Mary Worth, though.

Surely adults wouldn't pay to run pure mediocre crap in newspapers every day, right? There must be some merit in them?

Nostalgia for those over 70. Other than that, the funnies haven't been funny in I can't remember how long. When you have to do plots in a static universe where nobody ages or changes, it just gets DULL and WHO CARES about tuning back in? And most of the regular ones do that. For all the razzing I did about FBOFW in the past, at least it used to have plot changes and people grew up, so there was a point in following it. And Doonesbury, of course, has always done it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:13 PM on January 16, 2022

Oh yeah, and they couldn't get rid of Peanuts even after the death of the author. What does that tell you.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:14 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’ve been doing a classic Simpsons rewatch since getting Disneys streaming service and I JUST saw the Bart sells his soul episode today, with:

Comic Book Guy: Please no banging your head on the display case. It contains a very rare "Mary Worth" in which she has advised a friend
to commit suicide. Thank you.
posted by hwyengr at 3:10 PM on January 16, 2022 [16 favorites]

I agree some of those comments are unfairly fixated in Wilbur's physical appearance, when his personality flaws are such better targets for ridicule.

I guess... but with that conveniently sus combover, Wilbur is surely an archetypical instantiation of the unstated dramatic rule, "Hairology recapitulates morality." You don't have to know his backstory to see that he's meant to be an inadequate match for Estelle.
posted by xigxag at 4:47 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I had confused Mary Worth with Sally Forth and began wondering what weird stuff had been going on since I stopped reading the printed comics.
posted by cult_url_bias at 5:29 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sally Forth was really good!


(In my youth I thought it was for, I don’t know, colorless moms, but I was wrong about Sally Forth and, well, pretty much everything else—moms, women, myself.)
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:51 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Fan" is short for fanatic.
posted by klangklangston at 6:30 PM on January 16, 2022

Spoiler

He's just washed up on the shore of a desert island. Dammit.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:23 PM on January 16, 2022 [7 favorites]

... and then I learned the current Mary Worth artist is former Power Pack (and various other Marvel properties) artist June Brigman.
posted by jjderooy at 9:43 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

... the current male lead in the strip was tied up, in a barn, and someone had just heated up a horseshoe red hot and was about to put both his eyes out with it.

That sounds more like a "Mark Trail" story line tbh.

(When I was a kid in Boston in the 60s, the Globe had Mary Worth, Mark Trail, Terry and the Pirates, Rex Morgan MD, and Brenda Starr. Never saw the appeal of any of them. I loved Doonesbury and Bloom County.)
posted by panglos at 10:39 PM on January 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

You know, how was that Brenda Starr movie with Brooke Shields?

For some reason, in junior high or so a friend and I acquired an "orphaned punchline" type joke between us about how Mary Worth is always getting in peoples' business. I've never had any idea whether it was true and he died 20-something years ago, so perhaps this here is a good place to start.
posted by rhizome at 11:10 PM on January 16, 2022

Spoiler

This fits in with my hypothesis that the strip is stealthily being reoriented around animals instead of Mary, the former being much better influences on our lives and also cuter. Alone on the island, Wilbur is going to rage, until the gentle tapping of the crabs and singing of the birds and nipping of the fish is going to teach him the peace and pleasure of being one with the animal kingdom.

(That, or it's not a deserted island after all and he'll be taken in by some scammers who'll have him calling Estelle and telling her that she lost her chance and now he's found true love. I guess that could happen in either scenario.)

posted by trig at 11:43 PM on January 16, 2022

Wasn't Mary Worth the figure from the urban legend where if you say her name three times near a mirror, she'll appear and drag your soul to Hell or something?
posted by acb at 7:26 AM on January 17, 2022

That's Bloody Mary, acb. But I also assume you weren't serious.
posted by Hey, Zeus! at 8:56 AM on January 17, 2022

Is Mary Wrath a thing yet? Because the sirens of satire are pretty much hollerin on that one
posted by elkevelvet at 10:16 AM on January 17, 2022

This is a pretty good collection of Wilbur highlights.
posted by RobotHero at 2:00 PM on January 17, 2022

Imagine me as Morticia Addams, "Oh no... he lives."
posted by merriment at 2:12 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Beat me to it,They sucked his brains out! Oddly, that was the last concert before the pandemic for me.
posted by evilDoug at 2:24 PM on January 17, 2022

I feel like I shouldn't read too many of these. I hate soap operas, as the daily cliffhangers are dangerously addictive. I was able to pull CBC off the airwaves from south of the border, and I went on an on-and-off Coronation Street thing for a couple years. Uh, awful.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:57 PM on January 17, 2022

When I was a kid in Boston in the 60s, the Globe had Mary Worth, Mark Trail, Terry and the Pirates, Rex Morgan MD, and Brenda Starr. Never saw the appeal of any of them.

Oh, c'mon, Terry and the Pirates had the best chins in profile ever.
posted by y2karl at 9:16 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

When I was growing up in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s, the Globe and Mail ran both Mary Worth and Rex Morgan MD. I didn't have enough of an attention span to keep track of the story lines - I just recall that it was Serious Adult Stuff.

Besides, the Globe and Mail was running Pogo up until Walt Kelly died, and that was way more cool.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 9:21 AM on January 18, 2022

welp it turns out Wilbur washed up on a resort island and hung out there for a week and let everyone think he was dead so he could "surprise" them. The writer of Mary Worth understands there is no justice to be had in the year 2022 and has plotted the story accordingly.
posted by Anonymous at 5:27 PM on February 8, 2022

Wilbur has apparently been turned into a scary story kids tell each other in Mark Trail.
posted by RobotHero at 3:22 PM on February 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think that's on the mark (sorry); I think that Ian's question to Wilbur about whether he was suffering from any aftereffects, and Wilbur's weird "How old are you" to Toby, are clear foreshadowing. What came back from that island isn't exactly Wilbur.
posted by trig at 5:01 PM on February 11, 2022 [2 favorites]