Shortpacked! by David Willis
Toys are serious business.
Convention appearances:
Calgary Expo Calgary, AB: April 26-28
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Multiplex
Sorcery 101
Templar, AZ
The Transformers Wiki
Hail to the Slash
80 page GIANT
Axe Cop
The Book of Biff
Butt-Taco
Comics Curmudgeon
College Roomies from Hell!!!
Diesel Sweeties
Dinosaur Comics
Dr. McNinja
Dresden Codak
Fans!
Fleen
Gastrophobia
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Goats
Hark, a vagrant
Hijinks Ensue
Intrepid Girlbot
Legend of Bill
Medium Large
Not Invented Here
Octopus Pie
Overcompensating
Penny Arcade
PhDcomics
Power Nap
Questionable Content
Real Life
Rob and Elliot
Bad Machinery
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
So Far Apart
Something Positive
Two Lumps
Wapsi Square
Wonderella
Wondermark
Frumph.NET
Sorcery 101
Templar, AZ
The Transformers Wiki
Hail to the Slash
80 page GIANT
Axe Cop
The Book of Biff
Butt-Taco
Comics Curmudgeon
College Roomies from Hell!!!
Diesel Sweeties
Dinosaur Comics
Dr. McNinja
Dresden Codak
Fans!
Fleen
Gastrophobia
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Goats
Hark, a vagrant
Hijinks Ensue
Intrepid Girlbot
Legend of Bill
Medium Large
Not Invented Here
Octopus Pie
Overcompensating
Penny Arcade
PhDcomics
Power Nap
Questionable Content
Real Life
Rob and Elliot
Bad Machinery
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
So Far Apart
Something Positive
Two Lumps
Wapsi Square
Wonderella
Wondermark
Frumph.NET
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©2005-2013 David Willis | Powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS | Back to Top ↑
ARGH THIS HURTS TO READ
because it’s true D=
Exactly because this is so a pot calling the kettle black situation.
The second-to-last panel has an eyeroll of Jill proportions.
…there’s a good reason for that.
*Sigh* Okay, Willis, you earned your anual BJ.
(gets mouth-Lube)
New meme: MARY WORTH SCORNS YOUR LIFESTYLE
In the next edition, facebook and stalkers.
Dunno … “I REALLY WANT SOME HAM” works for me … there’s almost never a bad time for ham.
Umm…introducing your fanatically kosher significant other to your family?
Yes, there are inappropriate times for ham.
http://www.teamspecialolympics.com/comic.php?sec=archive&auth=Blurbs&blurb=itfh&cid=blurbs/00003-itfh.jpg
This makes me wonder if there is some kind of variant of rule 34 that involves questions about foodstuffs already having fanart made to answer them.
I want some JaAm!
The exception being my muslim friends
Oh man, Mary Worth and Shortpacked…my life is complete now.
Okay, I know the “just a bunch of sentences” line is making fun of something else, I just can’t remember at the moment.
Nope.
This storyline can go on forever as far as I’m concerned. I love every newfangled moment of it.
If only that comic had been 140 characters of text, it would have been a subtle and clever self-parody.
(I counted, it’s 170-odd. 144 without spaces.)
I always skipped Mary Worth and the like when I was a kid because they looked “real” and “real” equals “not funny.”
Which is not at all a reflection on the work before me now. Just sayin’.
Well burned, sir.
Hear, hear. Truly sublime. I almost lost it on the second strip. The rest were just icing on a cake. A cake of pure insight and ironic glee.
I’ve never read Mary Worth, or any soap operatic comics, because Canadian newspapers do not run any of those. (Well, For Better or For Worse could arguably be one, but there are jokes in there.) However, I do note that you never make use of the dramatic gasp in the last panel.
That’s weird. Growing up, Mary Worth was a staple of our podunk metropolitan area’s newspaper.
Or possibly the podunk metropolitan area 45 minutes south of ours, which had its own competing paper and a largely different set of comics. (Both were distributed locally, the northern one being like unto the Tribune and the southern one like unto the Sun, only in a podunk.)
Talking about this makes me miss the Globe and Mail, only not really.
Brilliant.
It’s nice you have a sense of humor about the media that you work in, but it’s not quite the same as Twitter.
Things don’t have to be identical to be similar.
In all fairness though, can’t this commentary just as easily apply to Spider Man in the paper? And it’s spread out in only three or four panels at a time.
Maybe, but the generous use of A-list superheroes and villains appearing at random moments and Spider-Man and Mary Jane still being married, makes that a win in my book.
Spider-Man’s not doing a storyline about Twitter.
I didn’t take this as a commentary about Mary Worth; I took it as a commentary about people who proclaim that they don’t get Twitter.
Your grasp of keeping the background/setting from becoming a warped world of off-putting perspective lines and hovering furniture makes it obvious at a glance that this is not real Marry Worth.
I actually had to fix the background in the last panel, which is referenced from a strip from months back. The bedroom is a physical impossibility there, with an area behind the door that shares the same space with the hallway. There was also a dresser drawers behind the bed that had no room to exist. I decided to fix both of those.
The medium is the message?
To me, tweets are for twits! My local paper, the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News, carries Mary Worth to this day. There are a lot of funnier strips available to them.
I’M FROM HARRISBURG TOO!
well, was….then I moved to Houston.
In other news, I miss the comic “B.C.”
Until now, I hadn’t seen a Mary Worth comic strip in at least 10 years.
Dave, I’d've given you bonus points if you’d made the text in each comic less than 140 characters. Strip 1 hits the mark, but the other 3 are too wordy.
Well, technically, wouldn’t it be better to check each speech balloon for character length?
I’m a little disappointed you used 153 characters in the second from last frame (“Enough of this foolish Twitter…”). Just a bit more trimming and every panel would have fit in a tweet. As it is, the strip managed to convey a little extra information!
Back in the 1980′s, and I think even into the early 1990′s, the local newspaper still ran “Apartment 3-G.” Still runs Mary Worth, though.
I just want to say I read this comic all the time, though I never post:
Today going on the roller coaster for the first time as I was going up the ramp I turned to my friends and said “This is so Babies” they now all think I am an idiot since they have kids.
Willis I blame you…
But love the comic keep it up!
I am French, and I have no idea what this is.
I am American, and I didn’t either until I followed the links.
I still got the joke, though. It helps that he provided strip dates.
I’m twelve years old and what is this?
What? As opposed to telegrams where you were limited to about 10 words without excess cost back in the times of telegrams, so they ended up developing coded pronunciation in order to get the same message across with a fraction of the cost?
lol ur riteon
Comics Curmudgeon and Shortpacked! My sources for Mary Worth fun! Almost as fun as the perpetually homoerotic adventures (but not) of Rex Morgan and the tedious bumbling significant other of Mark Trail!
I don’t know who or what Rex Morgan is, but you sold it to me with “perpetually homoerotic”.
“Meted”, yes? – http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mete
Most Twitter feeds I read are unrelated sentences. Books kinda have words that go together.
Just saying.
Not a book of Haiku poetry!
I would take the time to read this comic, but honestly, my dislike for the real version of this strip is strong enough for me to not even want to try.
Best Mary Worth ever!
Seriously though, when do we find out if there is any ham?
Dammit! It’s only 9 AM and now I want ham!
I see what you did there!
Creepily-accurate art, by the way.
It’s not for you, dude. It’s not for you. It’s for your grandma, who hears the anchor on the nightly news mention a “twitter feed” and thinks it’s something to do with bird watching. Mary Worth is the means by which the elderly receive updates on the latest cultural trends.
It’s kind of like their Facebook feed, but one-sided. And made of paper. And boring.
Imitation is the sincerest form of ridicule?
While I agree with the joke here (since those style of comics have always been annoying) I also agree with Mary, since I’ve never been able to figure out Twitter. Someone posts a link to it with some sort of information that is supposed to be useful, but I can’t find it! On top of that, I don’t know what everyone is responding to. You click on a name and it just takes you to thier page, where there are more unconnected sentences. At least a book has them all lined up!
I’ve never more than glanced at twitter and never plan too. It reminds me too much of people who say any stupid thing that crosses their mind, while never having anything *to* say.
In other words, you don’t get Twitter. Don’t worry. It’s okay.
Ah parody. It’s not only funny, it’s protected by the Constitution.
Mary Worth? Is that the one about that woman that ruins other people’s lives?
So meta!
I’ve never heard of Mary Worth before; but by seeing this first I can’t tell if its parodying itself (in the current story).
Only two panels? That would work if there were like… punchlines. :\
Hmm. I’m conflicted. Tweets are stupid, but so is Mary Worth.
I GET IT
What I wanna know is who tunes in to newspapercomics to read -serious stories- I mean.. even if they weren’t super short and pointless..
Brilliant, but you forgot the Sunday strip where they rehash everything that just happened.
Man this hurts.
So, uh, you made a comic about the fact that someone else’s fictional character doesn’t like Twitter? I don’t get the joke.
Lots of people, real and fictional, don’t like Twitter. How is Mary Worth notable?
So little you know about comics history: MARY WORTH is one of those strips that can go for *months* without a single thing happening. If Philip Glass were to draw a comic strip instead of compose music, it would be MARY WORTH.
Note her complaints carefully, and note the style and writing of the reals trip. David turned it up a bit, but it’s still there.
Every complaint Mary has about Twitter is also true about her comic strip. For instance, each day has about two sentences. The text is often inflated, but almost always says nothing.
And if you’ve ever followed a newspaper story strip, it not only takes forever for it to get anywhere, it usually takes forever to even start going somewhere.
LockeZ – The Mary Worth comic as a story advances *so very slowly* in very tiny chunks, so that it takes “forever to learn anything of import” in them. And it is basically the “trivial details of the lives of others metered out in small chunks of time”. Hence by having Mary Worth criticize Twitter for the very qualities of the Mary Worth newspaper comic, it’s displaying humorous irony.
But if you’ve never really been exposed to much Mary Worth, you might not get the irony or humor.
Ah. Well, without knowing any details, I would probably instinctively blame most of those problems on the requirements of newspapers and syndicates, not on the comic creator. The length of each comic is their fault for sure, and most of the other problems are probably side-effects of that (except for Wilbur really wanting ham).
I also didn’t catch the seperate dates in the comic until now. That does make it funnier and somewhat clearer.
Ha ha, you really can’t blame the faults of Mary Worth on newspaper syndication. It once took an ENTIRE WEEKS WORTH OF DAILY STRIPS for Wilbur to eat a sandwich while deciding how to respond to a message over facebook. It really is THAT BAD.
Aah, now that makes sense.
Really, really awesome. Good job.
LOL! I didn’t get this at first until I checked out the actual Mary Worth comics, and it was so frustrating only getting two panels at a time… And that’s when it twigged ha!
I just went and read the last month’s Mary Worth strips.
I feel dumber, now.
This is inaccurate. You need to bold or italicize every other word, and end it with a shot of someone looking at a phone.