Saturday, March 14, 2015

Haven't posted this here yet, so I might as well...

A recent Mary Worth comic, as reconfigured by your humble blogger. The "POOF" is from Wizard of Id.

Dr. Jeff Porky.
This is another doctored Mary Worth comic, crudely reconfigured by me in tribute (?) to John Woo's Face/Off. It features sixtysomething widow Mary Worth, an advice-slinging gentlewoman of leisure, and her long-time, long-suffering boyfriend, Jefferson "Jeff" Cory, MD, a retired chief of staff from the local hospital.  Mary and Jeff are both residents of  Santa Royale, CA, a sleepy, pastel-colored burg where Mary lives in a plush condo community called Charterstone. (I think Jeff lives in Charterstone, too, but I'm not 100% sure on that. It doesn't matter, since everyplace in Mary Worth looks the same.) The reason I know any of this is because of Josh Fruhlinger's marvelous Comics Curmudgeon blog, where I'm a near-daily commentator and where Mary Worth, currently written by Karen Moy and drawn by Joe Giella, is one of the strips routinely up for discussion/ridicule. Of all the strips regularly featured on Comics Curmudgeon, Mary Worth is perhaps closest to my heart. It's even funnier than Mark Trail and Apartment 3-G, which is saying a lotThere's just something so endearingly square about it that I can't help but love it -- the stilted dialogue, the glacial plots, the questionable fashion choices, and the bizarre-looking food. (Who can forget Mary's famous salmon squares?) In all, Mary Worth is one of the fleeting pleasures which help make life worth living, which is apparently why I decided to morph Dr. Jeff with Porky Pig in that picture you see off to the right. Maybe it's because Jeff and Porky really know how to rock a blazer.