Friday, May 17, 2013

Mary Worth 1,595

This panel isn't as scandalous as you may be thinking. Uncle Joe has simply drawn Beth with three shoulders.

Today's Full Strip

24 comments:

QuakerJohn said...

Panel 1 Beth could be used in the dictionary to illustrate "derpy".

KitKat said...


TomBeth's clothing underscores that these two derps (thanks, Quaker John) were made for each other. They must shop at Santa Royale's "Flashback to the Worst of the 50s" vintage store. Tom's Ban-Lon pullover and orange pants are perfectly complemented by Beth's Phys Ed ensemble. My (much older) sister had a gym suit just like that, except it was green.

Here's how Beth has transformed the life of this lonely workaholic bachelor: He's going to quit his job (whatever that is) and live off Beth's romance-novel earnings.

The only thing that can rescue this week's strips is Elinor on a bike crashing into TomBeth this weekend.

Toby's Evil Clown Model said...

Meanwhile, Skelinor's neglected corpse is starting to smell, permeating all of the walls of Charterstone, drowning out all of the more subtle odors of Depends and Ben Gay.

fauxprof said...

Thanks, Wanders, for figuring out why panel two looks so strange. Three shoulders it is. Uncle Joe uses M.C. Escher techniques not only in backgrounds, but in figures as well.

KitKat is right about the "fashions" being from the fifties. I must be of the vintage of her sister, because that's my Central Catholic gym ensemble, right down to the color. (This plot is from the fifties, too.)

JustSayin' said...

In both panels, Beth's head looks like she has some kind of neck disorder, probably due to the excessive size of her head in the first drawing. ET phone home...

@Toby's Evil... loved that Skelinor reference! :-)

KitKat said...

@fauxprof at 9:12 AM, my sister is Class of 1957, St. Stanislaus High School (Cleveland).

Allen said...

Whaaaaaat? It's only been a few weeks in the Worthverse and he's already professing his undying love? Geez. I wonder what job he's such a "workaholic" at, since he's never there.

And how in the world has this bland, frumpy, and below-average looking dullard inspire such passion within Tom?

Toots McGee said...

When you entered the life of this lonely, workaholic bachelor with your excessively seasoned pork glops and obsessively washed carrot mash and your blueblack bangs and your rubberized neck, you gave it purpose and meaning and depth and continuity errors and opened vistas of love and understanding and quieted the storms of my desperate longing and reduced the longings of the cold and flu season and the interminable visits of Mary Worth and her artisinal soups and pies of unknown fillings and you filleted my heart like a mullet and made my loneliness and desperation recede like waves on a rocky beach, and the the sun rose in your eyes and my heart walks in the sun like lovers do on shores of buzzy feeling, this hopeless shut-in has opened the window to let out the stench of hot dog water and outdated saurkraut and the questionable decisions of hygiene or the lack thereof and my spirits lifted higher than the vaulted accoustic ceiling panels of Santa Royale with their swarms of insects, who were the only creatures who kept me company without unpalatable casseroles of fermented tubers and the Santa Royale winds sang lonely songs to me louder than the clunking compressor on the AC unit that Mr. Alora hasn't gotten to because he was busy carting your mother's steamer trunk up to your place, which smells wierd, as do you, but we have time to sort that out later, like the laundry we will do together and the gambolling down these wide corridors past the mall walking grannies who will take note of the love shining brightly between a formerly lonely bachelor and an eccentricly spinsterish foodie romance novelist sharing our devotion among the trees and rocks and park benches and magical hobos and other denizens who will sing along with our hearts when they sing and our necks when they crane to conspire to smash our lips together in spontaneous waves of joy and unfettered love and other public displays of food and synchronized cannonballs into the pools of blissful togetherness in what will certainly be a love to stand up to the ravages of time and indigestion!

Chester the Dog said...

@Toots. I was thinking something similar, since Elinor is an old lady, she must smell like old lady, and Beth must have a hint of old lady smell on her too.

All I can say is "Oh, Tom!"

katyb said...

@toots mcgee
you forgot the fish

Gina said...

Is that frolicking I see in panel 1? I thought frolicking was only for not-dads and their not-sons.

WV: axednag, which is what Elinor is probably going to be by the end of this story. More's the pity.

Dawn Weston's Evil Twin said...

Why did Tom Harpman split with his ex-wife? Was it because of his workaholism? Didn't he love his ex-wife when they first got together? I think that Beth is in for a nasty surprise a few months down the road when Tom reverts to being a workaholic and Tom's cloying "love" becomes mundane and begins to fade.

Thorpnotized said...

"Oh, Tom... I love the way you smell my hair!"

meg said...

Toots McGee- thanks a lot! You have totally destroyed my idyllic dream of Santa Royale as a sun-washed hamlet where neighbors help-and sometimes love- neighbors. Now it seems to be only a fetid place of crude passion and...and... oh, never mind...
(Go, Toots! Surrender yourself to the force that is Mary Worth- I certainly have.)

Carlye said...

What I want to know is, how are they managing to get so much time together? What is Beth telling Elinor she's doing, or where she's going?

Toots McGee said...

For those of you that don't follow Gil Thorp, check this out: Gil uses the patented Mary Worth grip on his spatula when he grills out.

Chin Napkin Groupie said...

Dawn Weston's Evil Twin @11:26am

Tom Harpman broke up with his first wife because she couldn't cook and all he could make were hot dogs. They damn near starved.

kathyo said...

Tom Harpman is a workaholic all right; he works hard at being a gigolo. That is the only possible explanation for this plot line. Elinor's hunch about him will turn out to be correct.

Unknown said...

check out over Tom's right shoulder can his job be a marijuana farmer or is Uncle Joe a pot head sending us a subliminal message

NonnyMus said...

Carlye,

Mary Worth told Elinor that Beth was dead and now Toby is checking in twice a day.

That's why Mary and Toby were getting so drunk the other day! Remember when Mary said she ran into Elinor separately.

Since it doesn't matter to Elinor who she terrorizes and since Toby is used to it kind of, that part's working out well.

We'll just have to wait and see what happens with Mary now that Beth has been dismembered by Tom and is actually dead!

Allen said...

Toots, your comment made my day!!

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile, Elinor is on her broom, writing "Surrender Tom!" in the cloudless, cerulean Santa Royale sky.

--Beagle Vet

Dave in Parma said...

Elinor seems to be getting a shooting jaw pain from holding her watering can at shoulder level.

katyb said...

Tom is not about Tom, too much, is he. If he refers to himself again as "this lonely workaholic bachelor" he'll qualify for the honorary Brian Regan Captain You-Planet Award.
Sheesh