Happy Birthday Grandpa Jim Part I

2 strips in a row with grandpa Jim. It has been almost a year since grandpa Jim was featured in a weekly strip outside of Christmas. The last time was when April came back from school after essentially breaking up 4-Evah by herself, but blaming Becky for not trying to go on with it and Jim had 1 strip of that sequence comforting April. The people over at Foobiverse’s Journal have speculated that this may be the beginning of the “Kill Jim” sequence. There are a couple of good reasons to get this impression. It is the first time Jim’s birthday has had everyone there including Mike, Dee, Merrie and Robin in the entire 3 years of For Better or For Worse on-line strip archive. Such a gathering is auspicious.

aprilp_katje riffed off the tag line of grandpa Jim being told by Elly not to spoil his grandkids, with April writing that was a little, shall we say, not-nice, instead of the usual “I’m cooler than my strip self” kind of stuff. It was a refreshing change and I found Jeremy and Constable Paul Wright were able to work with it. I had originally planned to do nothing on the constable except to explain about Ojibway history regarding the moccasin known as the Ojibway or puckered moccasin. However, aprilp_katje’s remarks started me down the research path to answer the question, “Do Ojibway grandparents spoil their grandkids?” The answer from the on-line sources was “No. or Yes, but not in the way you would think.” Ojibway people have lots of kids and grandkids typically (if the on-line stuff is to be believed) and there was an overwhelming emphasis on the grandparents as teachers of the old ways and traditions. I found this interesting, since the good constable had quoted his grandfather in his first strip appearance alongside Elizabeth. I have mocked some of the inaccuracies of Lynn’s portrayal of the Ojibway before, so I was pleasantly surprised to see what appeared to something fairly authentic. I will have to admit that Lynn’s research on the Ojibway is far more thorough than her research on almost anything else. In any case, the Constable Paul Wright post was longer than I had originally intended, and I was able to work in my favourite character in Mtigwaki, Phil Goulais, the toupee-wearing store owner who tried to cheat Elizabeth out of some money during her star-gazing storyline.

Jeremy on the other hand, just whined about how his life is worse than April’s and put together what I thought would be a nice bookend to the Eva’s being erased storyline with the Everett Callahan being erase. Eva needed help, but Everett doesn’t think he needs help.

Then Howard launched into the main storyline for the day for me, the leveraging of Becky’s dad to let Becky sing. I had it in my head that it was this big thing qnjones had put together about why Thorvald wouldn’t let Becky sing, and it turned out I had blown a minor plot point she wanted for Becky to go on a date to the opening of the Valhalla way out of proportion to what she intended. All went well, and qnjones was able to meet the challenge quite nicely. She is an excellent writer. I try to match her with Norse mythology references, but she always manages to outdo me. Maybe someday.

Tomorrow’s strip: 2 persons in the strip whom have never spoken to each other, talk. Merrie and grandpa Jim have an actual conversation and the punchline is not too bad. These 2 should talk more often.