After more than 20 years on the job, Karen Moy ’87 still considers it “a blessing and an honor” to write the longtime daily comic strip “Mary Worth.”
“The stories and characters reflect different societal problems in the country,” Moy says. “Mary doesn’t have all the answers, but she often ends up helping her neighbors, friends and acquaintances because of her experience and compassion.”
Eric Coker for Binghamton University Magazine interviews/profiles alumna Karen Moy.
About Mary Worth Karen says:
“She is the lynchpin,” Moy says. “She’s a catalyst for them solving their problems or seeing a different viewpoint. Mary is the kind of neighbor you want: proactive, wants to help you if she can, not too nosy, but interested in other people.”
After working in medical advertising, Moy got a job as an assistant with Hearst Corporation [2000], which owns King Features. She served as a comic strip ghostwriter when the need arose.
“I said: ‘Yes, I can do it’ and submitted samples of my work,” she says. “Based on those scripts, I was accepted as a temporary ghostwriter for other comic strips. When ‘Mary Worth’ needed a ghostwriter, I volunteered for that, too. I was already a fan of the ‘Mary Worth’ world, so it came easily to me and was a good fit.”
In early 2004, Moy became the credited writer of the comic strip after John Saunders (son of original “Mary Worth” writer Allen Saunders) died.
Moy put her own touches on the strip after taking over the storytelling, introducing new characters and neighbors for Mary. For her first 12 years as writer, Moy worked with comic-book artist Joe Giella, a legendary illustrator who was an inker for DC Comics during the “Silver Age of Comic Books” in the late 1950s and 1960s. After retiring in 2016, Giella was replaced by June Brigman, who spent 16 years illustrating the “Brenda Starr, Reporter” comic strip (Brigman drew the “Mary Worth”-style illustration on the cover of Binghamton University Magazine).
Read Karen Moy’s Mary Worth at Comics Kingdom.
Post Script:
The “continuity strip” or “soap opera strip” has been a fixture in newspapers since its debut in 1938.
For whatever reason King Features refuses to acknowledge that Mary Worth started in 1934 as Apple Mary.
… when Martha Orr died at the age of 92 on July 27, 2001, she unintentionally launched a minor ripple of controversy in the backwater of investigative comics research. In preparing Orr’s obituary, the Chicago Tribune reporter who wrote it had the presence of mind to phone King Features, the syndicate currently distributing the strip, where he talked to an unnamed official who denied, oddly, that the two strips were at all related. Mary Worth, so this personage claimed, was a replacement strip that was offered to client newspapers when Mrs. Hassel retired in 1939.
The syndicate has toed that line ever since.
Within four months of its debut Apple Mary’s identity as Mary Worth was revealed.
Bodacious congratulations on this wonderful profile, Karen! And on 20 years of writing Mary Worth! You and June do such an incredible job the strip!
I believe the Moy/Giella strip above should read “May 17, 2004,” a typo which made me think I was wrong about Joe’s 2023 death.
date corrected
Congratulations to Karen Moy!
While I enjoy the comic strip, Moy’s never-ending storylines portraying the arrogant and selfish character of Wilbur Weston as someone who should be accepted for his “endearing quirks” (Mary’s description) has gone off the deep end. Speaking of such, I really wish she had considered killing him off with that drunken fall off the cruise ship. There’s no need to foist him onto another relationship with an attractive woman who will eventually flee before she loses her sanity.
I think that Wilbur Weston is now an intentionally ridiculous comic character. I think Ms. Brigman may have something to do with that. Mary Worth sometimes makes me laugh out loud, and I think that’s the intent.
Although I personally believe that the “Apple Mary isn’t Mary Worth” was an honest mistake made by a uninformed KFS staffer who didnt know the history of the strips that didn’t start at King. There are however various business reasons to want to believe that the strip was created by a staff writer, Allen Saunders, and not a freelancer.
Retaining complete copyright and trademark control over the property could very well explain King Features’ continued insistence, despite all evidence to the contrary, on the alternative fact.