Mary Worth Taken Over By Brain-Eating Virus

I don’t want to bore you too much with the story comics, because they are story comics, engaged in some race to produce the most boring storyline imaginable, and last year’s sequence in Apartment 3-G — where Tommie and Some Other Woman spent literally and without exaggeration more than thirty days engaged in a series of two-shots talking about how they ought to talk about something — is a ferociously high bar of boredom to meet. But, well, just look at this Sunday’s Mary Worth:

Karen Moy and Joe Giella’s Mary Worth for the 8th of February, 2015, and — in the bottom row, first panel — Mary Worth completely losing track of her mission statement.

Now, Hanna and Sean are getting married because they’re two unmarried people who got on-panel in Mary Worth, so they have to. Hanna’s daughter Amy is angry about the wedding because (a) she doesn’t know Sean at all, and (b) her mother has started refusing when Amy’s brought her child over to Hanna’s place, unannounced, for baby-sitting whenever Amy discovers she has an unexpected date for the night. Hanna concluded that it’s best if she just married Sean and let Amy find out about it afterwards, and Mary Worth agreed on-panel that this was a good idea. And then, today, well.

“These things tend to have a way of working themselves out, anyway”?

This is already a boring strip, but if Mary Worth is going to take up the attitude that all troubles will someday pass, and that to exert oneself unduly is counter-productive, then the comic strip could achieve a vast expanding swath of nothingness that destroys all possible content, so I guess the story comics aren’t in for a good decade after all.

I could go on, at disturbing length, complaining about all the things that have gone wrong in this storyline to have reached this point, but the main thing is the script reached the point of Mary Worth declaring “these things tend to have a way of working themselves out”. Yes, there was one time Captain Kirk let the planet of the week keep their omnipotent computer-god overlord too, but that was the time McCoy had contracted a fatal case of We Need Him To Go Off And Get Temporarily Married syndrome, so Kirk’s mind was on other stuff. Mary Worth hasn’t got any excuse.

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