You know the ones: Rex Morgan, M.D., Mary Worth, Gil Thorpe.
I’m first wondering if anybody here on the Dope reads these. If you do, why? Is it just one of those things where you get caught up in the characters and the plot and then, suddenly, you’re checking the paper every day? They seem like relics from the days when comics were given more freedom.
In fact, any interesting factoids would be of interest to me.
And I figure, since so many comics are so bad anyway (these questions were inspired by this thread), say I wanted to follow one of these for a year. Which would you recommend? I’m honestly curious here. As a kid, I hated these; now I’m simply perplexed and, somehow, vaguely intrigued.
If you want to get into these strips, you can do it the same way I did – get hooked on The Comics Curmudgeon, a blogger who lays the snark on Rex Morgan, Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, Gil Thorpe, Mark Trail, Spider-Man, Funky Winkerbean, and many more. I never paid attention to half these strips until I discovered this blog. My favorites are Mary Worth and Apt. 3G, because they seem to give Josh (the blogger) the best material. (You can find the archives from Josh’s blog by using the dropdown menu in the left-hand sidebar, which categorizes posts by the comics they discuss.)
All you need to know about Mary Worth: She’s an older woman who lives in an apartment complex surrounded by people in whose lives she loooves to insinuate herself. Meddling is her raison d’etre – Mary’s drawn to misery and mediocrity, and finds them everywhere. I became attached to MW and the abovementioned blog back in the summer of 2006, when a guy named Aldo Kelrast (the last name is an anagram…) tumbled head over heels in creepy obsessive love with our Mary, but apparently she didn’t have a thing for guys who looked just like Captain Kangaroo. Anyway, Aldo didn’t end very well. Meanwhile, Mary’s also helped save a teenaged skater from her hard-driving coach/father, a neighbor from falling for an internet ID theft scam, and her current boyfriend from fulfilling his life’s dream of saving lives in Vietnam (Mary’s goals are more important than his own).
Then there’s Apt. #3G, the tale of three single gals living in an NYC without any ethnics or excitement: Tommie, the red-headed mousey nurse who has no real life to speak of and lets herself get bullied around by almost everyone; Lu-Ann, the southern blonde who thinks she’s an artist and once saw ghosts of old artists when she was overwhelmed by (IIRC) paint fumes; and above all, Margo, the hot-headed brunette bitch goddess, who’s a party planning entrepreneur who rules over the other two with an iron fist and lots of snark. Floating around their lives are a series of men who look exactly alike and have no personalities of their own. Margo is hilariously self-involved and pretty much tells the others what to do.
I actually don’t read the comics “live” – just in the Comics Curmudgeon blog. Anyway, if you have any questions, shoot!
There was a brilliant (but short-lived) strip in the 70s called The Virtue of Vera Valiant by Stan Lee and Frank Springer that was a pastiche of these.
Some soap-opera strips are notable for bravura “good girl” art, like On Stage and Tiffany Jones (Since they dealt with Broadway and fashion modeling, respectively, no big surprise).
One of the better ones is Crankshaft. It hides the continuity stories in the humor, but there are some very good stories. There was the story of Lucy McKenzie, who slowly died of Alzheimer’s. A few weeks ago, there was a story about playing baseball against Fidel Castro, and what happened when Castro tried to cheat.
Most of the strips are daily gags, but when they go off to tell a story, it’s always first-class.
I second at least supplementing your venture into soap opera strips with a daily dose of the Comics Curmudgeon.
I’d recommend Apt. 3-G. We recently had a wacky home invasion storyline that ended with the villain being sprayed in the face with hairspray, beaten by an umbrella, soaked by washwater after a housecleaning neighbor upended her bucket on his head, and threatened with tasing by another extremely overeager neighbor (“I got the taser for Christmas and never got a chance to use it! Can I tase him, girls?”). By the time the police got there the home invader was begging to be taken away. Good times, good times.
Rex Morgan is another amusing one…the deeply closeted Dr. Rex Morgan has medical adventures with his wife, Nurse June, and “their” 6-going-on-40 daughter. We’ve previously seen the Morgans mentoring a teenage boy whose mother was a meth addict, solving the mystery of the flesh-eating bacteria, and currently investigating an epidemic on a cruise ship (which they’ve been on since about Thanksgiving…which makes it about two weeks, strip-time).
Judge Parker is another good one…although the eponymous judge didn’t even appear in the strip for years, up until a couple of months ago…just in time for him to retire and pass the gavel to his (ambiguously-orientated) son. The real star of the strip is Sam Driver, a lawyer/detective, and his generously-endowed wife, Abby Spencer. This is another time-dilation strip…a week can last for mooooonths.
Mary Worth got awesome maybe a year or so ago - I’ve never read it myself but I work with a guy who would fill me in on all the crazy. Evidently it’s gone back to normal now, though.
Webcomics are better for good soapy storylines, if you don’t want to be bothered with paging through a newspaper. The main catches are that webcomics tend to be more by amateurs, since there’s less of a threshold to get into the field. Also, very few webcomics update daily. Expect MWF or TR updates, and maybe even just once/week updates.
One last caveat: I think maybe webcomic writers may have less discipline (or maybe just fewer constraints, what with having no editor), because a lot of times the stories can be rather… meandering. I love Alien Dice, but that plot doesn’t seem to be progressing much.
There’s only 2 soap-opera comics left in the Chicago Tribune: Brenda Starr and Dick Tracy. Brenda’s been written by Mary Schmich (a Tribune columnist) for some time now, and is often pretty topical and funny these days.
Dick Tracy, OTOH…it often has the pacing of a constipated turtle. It seems like every time Dick’s in a showdown versus the villain, it takes 3 weeks for the author to resolve it. Get on with it already!!
One of the webcomics I read is Sluggy Freelance, which started out as a gag strip, and evolved into a very complex soap-opera comic (albeit with a sci-fi/fantasy bent). And, it does update every weekday (unless Pete is feeling sick or burned out that week…)
Out of all these, I must say that a grey haired busy body meddling in the lives of her neighbors for a lack of anything better to do sounds really enticing. Mary Worth’s kind of the gold standard, yeah? At least it’s the one that’s been more of the newspapers I’ve picked up in the course of my life.
Although: go to Provo, Utah. Now that’s a weird funnies page.
I used to do some Mary Worth a few years ago. The story lines are sometimes interesting although I always thought some R-rated action would have improved the whole thing. Mary runs an apartment building. New characters move in. Highjinks ensue.
Mark Trail is worth looking at because it is clearly written by beings who have never visited planet Earth. Maybe it has improved recently… I hope.
Nope. It’s still as incoherent, ungrammatical, unanatomical, and socially weird as it ever was. The idea that the whole little family are Coneheads- or Third Rock-type aliens disguised as a human family makes more sense than the straight overlay it’s got now. And where did that strangely beige dog of Rusty’s come from, anyway? There are no dogs in nature with that coloration.
