Barry Alfonso at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette takes an insightful look at eternal busybody Mary Worth which continues even though it came in dead last in the paper’s popularity poll. According to Alfonso it’s because the strips very slowpoke nature gives it a unique appeal.
As the decades have passed, Mary Worth has truly become sui generis. There is nothing else in American entertainment quite like it. In this era of quick spurts of hype and flash, when an “interactive Web-based serial” like “lonelygirl15” can become the Flavor of the Nanosecond, Mary Worth stands apart as a true exotic. More than anything, it impresses by just continuing to continue.
Or it could just be that everyone loves a kindly old busybody who gives good sound advice and makes them feel homey!
[Link via Daily Cartoonist]
It continues because it is a serial strip, and because its readers are a vocal and valuable demographic. I also suspect that it is probably cheaper than other strips.
It never hooked me, although I was a frequent reader of Winnie Winkle, Gil Thorp, Dick Tracy, and even, SHUDDER, Dondi.
You did say homey, didn’t you? It’s just the font The Beat uses can’t sometimes be misread…
Faint praise indeed. It impresses because it continues to trudge along, an unstoppable juggernaut of boring, defying all reason and good sense in its mission to have Mary slowly but herself into the lives of people she would have better left alone.
For an always amusing take on America’s evidently not-favourite busybody, I always enjoy the work of the Comics Curmudgeon.