John Buys a Car Part III

In today’s strip, John and Gordon turn into the mutual admiration society and John finally breaks it to us that he wants to trade in his Bushwhacker, for what we already know will be a Crevasse sedan from two strips we have already seen. aprilp_katje contacted webmaster Stephanie from FBoFW and got a reply stating:

Lynn wrote some of those strips while on vacation, and she didn't have the earlier strips as reference for the continuity. This will be fixed before the strips are put into book form.

The way these kinds of strips are constructed, is first there is a script, which is a panel-by-panel description of the action and the words to go along with it. This is passed down to the artist, which is supposedly Lynn Johnston, but which we know could not possibly be Lynn Johnston, unless she changes her art style every few weeks. While the artist is working on that script, then the writer starts working on the next script for the next sequence of strips. In order for what Stephanie said to have happened, it means that Lynn wrote the March strips script, then when she was on vacation writing the ones for April, she didn’t have access to what she had written before in March. So in the intervening period of time, she had forgotten she had written on 2 separate occasions that John had already gotten his car, and then she decided to write the "John gets his car" story for April. It should be noted the same sequence of strips talked about Elly selling her business during her vacation in March and then turned around and showed her selling it again in April.

We know Stephanie the webmaster has a wicked sense of humour and you can see it in her reply. “Lynn wrote some of those strips while on vacation.” What did Elly and John just do in the strip on vacation? They did work and did not vacation. That’s a cute reference for the explanation. From a logical standpoint, it doesn’t work. Lynn is not the last person to touch those strips. They have to be inked and lettered and proofread and scanned. There is not a lot of material there. Such a blatant plot change would be difficult to miss with all that effort put into it. Not only that but there is a huge lead time from the time the strip is written to the time it actually gets sent out, the fix could easily be done. The fix for this would amount to no more than overlaying the speech balloon with another speech. Mike says “Dad went fishing.” Or John says, “I am thinking about trading in my car.”

I have my own theory. I think there is more than one art team and they don’t talk to each other. It takes much longer to draw this stuff than it does to write it and I think Lynn writes out different stories covering multi-week sequences and hands them off to different art teams. Then she doesn’t worry much about how they are going to fit into the timing. She leaves that up to other people. She writes:
1. The story about April freaking out while John and Elly are gone on their trip.
2. The story about John and Elly coming back from their trip and grampa Jim’s birthday.
3. The story about how Elly retires and John trades in his Crevasse.

The people putting together the strip then have to line up grampa Jim’s birthday with his actual birthday. Well they missed by a few weeks. Why did they miss? Because John and Elly’s trip had to fall over March break. That left the the Lilliputs and Crevasse story. Well we have to put that after the other two stories, because they are both restricted by the calendar, and this story is not. But then, oops, Lynn didn’t intend them to be in that order. We know that from John's Letter, March 2006:

The other thing that will happen at the end of March is the sale of Lilliputs!

I think the actual intended order was Stories 1, 3, 2. It that were the order, then the people’s comments would make more sense.

Constable Paul Wright. He is once again stuck in the position where there is not much he can do with this. I decided to find the actual Ojibway qualifications for elder and apply them very loosely to John Patterson, as the good constable appears to suck up to John as Gordon did.

Jeremy Jones panicked over the car mention. At lunch he took aprilp_katje’s feed on Josh the geek god being unerased and I decided to take that hopefully in a different route than expected where Josh actually liked being erased, in contrast to Eva who did not. I got the sense during the course of April's character conversation with Jeremy today that aprilp_katje either is extremely tired of my “Jeremy looks old” running joke or she is trying to do some character development where April actually finds Jeremy attractive. I am not sure which one. Both are possible.

Howard K. qnjones I think is spending time with her sister, so I decided to push along one of her plots for Becky and her boyfriend Drew Fontaine. Howard lives with Becky so it doesn’t make sense he wouldn’t say something about her, even though qnjones is not posting for her at this moment. Last, but not least, I had Howard tie in some reasons for the long ago major retcons involving Connie Poirier and her first/non-husband and aprilp_katje’s faux pas wrt Duncan’s family in the Creative Writing Forum and the erasing/unerasing of Josh.

Tomorrow’s strip: John and Gordon commiserate on the fact John has no spine. Cookie77 has been writing up on the Foobiverse’s Journal the transformation of Elly from women’s libber to whatever she is today. The thing I note in those strips is John is regularly portrayed as a distinctly politically incorrect character, whom Elly frequently shuts down with flying kitchen items or violent screams. He was detestable, but actually quite a bit funnier than he is today. Tomorrow we get to see the result of 27 years of Elly on a man who previously had a spine.