Mary Worth Weirdness

I am always amazed at the amount of work people put into honoring / satirizing (the line can be very thin) their favorite serial comics, such as Apartment 3-G, Gil Thorpe, For Better or For Worse, and Mary Worth. This is great because these venerable comics have survived for decades, despite the fickle and unforgiving newspaper comics business, which has trended toward favoring gag-a-day strips (which I love too) to the detriment of serial dramas. These serial strips, which tend to be unintentionally hilarious and over-the-top outrageous, are definitely kept alive by their fans.

A case in point is a bizarre website installment I stumbled across while trying to search for a good Mary Worth RSS feed (still looking, by the way). I watched, in a state of unexplainable discomfort, these oddly hypnotizing movies: 3D Lego-styled characters acting out the geriatric, judgmental adventures of Charterstone's most meddlesome biddy. They speak in appropriately robotic tones and periodically pause to gesticulate and convulse with dead expressions on their smooth faces. What insane, dedicated fan spends the time to create this brilliant mess? I will certainly be following this site, which seems to contain a lot of other comic strip snarkiness and sublty funny strip modifications, in the future.

Change, For Better or For Worse

No, that's not a reference to Lynn Johnston's brilliant comic, but rather a mundane announcement regarding a software change to this site. All the comic pages used to be served dynamically, using Python CGI. Under the hood, this involved a fair amount of processing, including XML parsing of the ComicsML data for each cartoon. I have rewritten the site to generate static HTML pages for each comic - this only affects you, the reader, if you have previously linked to any of the archived comic pages. If you have linked to a comic image, not a page, this will not affect anything.

I am generally against the practice of changing URLs, but I was always bothered by the limited scalability of my dynamic pages - especially since even the index page was generated dynamically (and my web host's machine isn't exactly a powerhouse). So I decided to bite the bullet and take the plunge. For the one or two people this may inconvenience (it's likely that no more than that many people actually read this comic), I offer my sincere apologies.