Mary Worth, 9/20/23

You know, if you're a Worth-head come lately, you might think of Mary Worth as a strip primarily about a core rotating cast of characters (Mary and Jeff, Wilbur and the sad parade of women who at one time or another had sex with him for some reason, Saul and Eve and their dogs, Ian and Toby if we're really desperate). But for most of this strip's history, Mary was a sort of Rod Serling-esque figure who served to introduce us to stories about one-off characters who wandered through Charterstone and/or the greater Santa Royale area and then left once their plot had been resolved, never to be seen again. I sincerely miss stories like "An old lady does not want her daughter to date” and "Charterstone's local pervert uses truly sick art to seduce the unwary” and "Uh oh! A child has been kidnapped!”, and I am honestly very hopeful that the absolutely huge slab of man-meat that is Keith Hillend (he's named that because he's bigger than the end of a hill) will end up being the center of a new self-contained story instead of getting entangled with, say, Dawn.

Gil Thorp, 9/20/23