Comic strips

Bob Harvey looks at Mary Worth history

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Alan Gardner February 1, 2012 1 minute 2 comments

Comic historian Bob Harvey takes a look at the history of the serial comic strip Mary Worth.

The version of history that inspires this diatribe claims that Martha Orr, a niece of Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist Carey Orr, started the comic strip that has always been dubbed the first soap opera strip. But she didn’t start it as a soaper; and it isn’t the first anyhow. Orr’s strip is the aforementioned Apple Mary, and it was launched in October 1934 and owed its being, doubtless, to a 1933 Frank Capra movie, Lady for a Day, which also starred a little old gray-haired lady who eked out a living during those hard times by selling apples from a cart she wheeled down the streets, broad and narrow. In her spare time, she helped everyone who stumbled into her path.

Via Tom Richmond