Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Pirates! Arrrrgh!

In today's For Better or For Worse, we had Grandpa Jim try to contact Frank, whom I presumed was Frank Thomas, his co-leader of the New Bentwood Rockers. For persons who are not avid readers of all things April's Real Blog, for reasons about which I am not sure, on 2 occasions, on-line homework assignments for courses Elly Patterson would take were created and an opportunity for the more adult (i.e. too old to be posting on April's Real Blog) people could write essays as a part of their course work which would snark For Better or For Worse. The first one was a great success, the second one less so. For this effort I decided to take on the role of Mae Thomas, whom I had remembered as the wife of Frank Thomas; but she was only mentioned in the letters of Grandpa Jim and never in the strip. I had a clear recollection of reading a monthly letter where Jim met Frank in the Legionnaires and although they did not serve in the same area, they had similar experiences and became fast friends. It was based on this I had written several posts in April's Real Blog about Mae being a Milborough native and instructing Iris on the ways of Milborough, particular on the issue of backup gays, which used to be a running joke in April's Real Blog a number of months ago.

If you go through all the on-line letters for Grandpa Jim, you may find that statement to be confusing, because in the on-line letters of Grandpa Jim, Mae was edited out. The only place she still exists is in the "Friends and Influences" section for Grandpa Jim with her name spelled May. I found this to be quite disconcerting, when I looked back through the letters to double-check something I was writing for a story involving Mae. It was after this point, I started keeping copies of the letters, just in case similar editing occurred again.

It seems like an odd thing to edit out. My theory as to what happened was someone somewhere at some point realized that Frank Thomas had been portrayed in the strip as African-American. Under the "Friends and Influences" section, Frank and May Thomas are represented by a picture of the building where they all live, instead of their picture. I would not want to paint Lynn Johnston as racist, but she has seemed to be going out of her way to avoid mixed race couples lately in her strip with the Duncan/Eva or Paul/Susan storylines. I wondered if the disappearance of Mae had something to do with that. I will probably never know. In any case, the monthly letters were putting out a lot of teenager hate at the time the first course was going on, so I made Mae Thomas into a woman who was hellbent on using mace against teenagers. The secondary characteristic was that Mae Thomas had a very active love life in contrast to the Pattersons.

The friend "Ben" who prompts the Blackbeard outburst does not appear in any monthly letter of Grandpa Jim's. Sorry, I can't tell you anything about him.

In today's strip, when Iris is kneeling in front of Jim, and my dirty mind starts going, I thought it would be a good idea to take the same situation and set it with Frank and Mae, only filthy.

Jeremy Jones has been continually visited by Zapata and Zenobia and they do versions of the strip dialogue, which I try to rework into something amusing. Today's amusement was cursing Jeremy to talk like a pirate, which worked well with today's pirate theme.

Howard Bunt commented on the book Grandpa Jim was using and then made a comment about the changes in April's monthly letter for February compared to prior months, i.e. this month she talks only about Gerald and doesn't mention Duncan and Eva. aprilp_katje did not bite on that one.

Michael Patterson did drop hints about how he was not going to visit Grandpa Jim until he was better, in the hopes that aprilp_katje would challenge on that point. She most certainly did bite on that one. So, I got to do my follow-up post about how Grandpa Jim should be completely recovered by September. This should be the case, in the event Grandpa Jim is called on to narrate one of his own strips.

4 Comments:

Blogger April Patterson said...

Howard Bunt commented on the book Grandpa Jim was using and then made a comment about the changes in April's monthly letter for February compared to prior months, i.e. this month she talks only about Gerald and doesn't mention Duncan and Eva. aprilp_katje did not bite on that one.

Only because I had no interesting or funny ideas about this.

3:59 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Too bad. I will simply have to enjoy your funny stuff on other topics then. ::Sob!::

6:10 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry, I'll try harder next time. ;)

6:34 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Oh, Goody!! :)

9:25 AM  

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