Happy Birthday Grandpa Jim Part III

I actually liked today's strip a bit, since there was an actual conversation between April and someone where she talked about something important to her. When April talks to her dad or mom, she is very guarded and even her fear confession to Connie Poirier 2 weeks ago was temporary and unimportant. It was interesting that April was still holding this grudge against Becky. It showed the problems with maintaining a strict schedule for your strip’s timing versus the real world and the fact you are telling a story for a graphic novel 4-5 panels a day. When this is collected into a book, the reader will jump very rapidly from the grade 8 grad to high school, so it will not seem like an extraordinary period of time for April to be moping about Becky. From the real-time standpoint, April seems like a woman obsessed with this one incident to be carrying on about it 9 months later. I remember remarking back when 4-Evah actually broke up was when April said she did not want to continue and Gerald and Duncan also immediately decided to stop. It was as if, Gerald and Duncan had no plans to stop if April was still in the group. The group existed only if April was participating, which from a Lynn Johnston perspective makes perfect sense. April’s January monthly letter and February monthly letter individually mentioned Gerald and Duncan wanting to restart the band, and from a real-time standpoint, you have to wonder why they haven’t done it; because April is going to leave during the summer for 2 months back to Winnipeg (if the monthly letters are to be believed) and if they want to play something somewhere, there is not much time to do it.

Today, I had Jeremy, through his lunch with Eva and Shannon, talk about the band and I dropped the hint that both Jeremy and Shannon could play the keyboard, just in case that is the direction the strip plans to go. I revisited the strip where Shannon freaked out about being asked by April to play bells with 4-Evah and if the Lynnions maintain any kind of character continuity, there is no way Shannon will be the new keyboardist. If they go with Jeremy, it will be odd also, since he has only been shown to have audio board skills and he has been linked very closely with Becky. It would have to be a new character if it happens at all, which also seems unlikely because Lynn does not seem to be interested in developing any new characters. Eva was mentioned, so she has a chance, but I think she is going to be like Beatrice Alfarero things where when she finally does reappear, you don’t learn anything else new about her.

The good constable could not do much with today’s strip, because it is too close in theme to yesterday’s strip. Then Howard launched into his bizarre naked, opera singing comparisons.

Tomorrow’s strip: Well, it could actually go nowhere with 4-Evah, if grandpa Jim’s prediction about no one taking his advice comes true. Given the time constraints I described above, that is going to be my guess. Mentioned but not acted on.