Many years ago, when I was a young lad in Detroit with the funny pages spread out before me from the city’s two major newspapers, I tried to tackle the ulitmate challenge: to read the soap opera strips. Every other strip was breezy and readable. But, ah, those soap opera strips: they were impenetrable. Rex Morgan, Gil Thorp, and the crown jewel of them all, Mary Worth. Before the days of the internet, it was impossible to follow thier storylines unless you subscribed to every damn newspaper throughout the week. Read them Sunday to Sunday, and it made absolutely no sense. So why would I even bother undertaking such a challenge? Because I wanted to understand why in the world these strips even existed. I mean, they were in the papers… someone was reading them, right?
It wasn’t until recently, when I came across The Comic Curmudgeon, that I managed to follow entire storylines. And I still have no ideas why they exist. They storylines are ludicrous, and the writers seem to have no idea what the modern world is like. Most of the current crop are hold-overs from earlier eras when the comic pages were read by a more diverse audience.
With the exception of For Better or Worse and Funky Winkerbean, there haven’t been any new soap opera strips in the American funny pages for a while. Japan’s another story, and soap opera comics exist in manga form. I can’t think of any recent examples, but Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku and Kimagure Orange Road are often held up as shining examples. They combine humor, sweetness, and the common theme of unrequited love.
Are these any soap opera comic strips in the webcomic world? This brings us to today’s subject: Marry Me, an online graphic novel written by Bobby Crosby and illustrated by Remy Mokhtar.
