56 Forever
With the coming of the hybrid to For Better or For Worse, this becomes the last time Elly Patterson will have a birthday.
In Lynn Johnston’s interview on CBC, CBC says:
After completing her current storyline in September or October, she will stop telling the continuing story of the extended Patterson family and begin running a mix of older strips and occasional newly drawn panels that will help reintroduce old storylines.
By current storyline, I presume they mean Anthony and Elizabeth getting married. It’s good to know she doesn’t plan to drag that one on forever.
Q: This “hybrid” strip seems to have caused a lot of confusion among your readers and editors. Many of them assumed you’d be retiring outright in September 2007, which you had stated publicly in several interviews over the past few years. Then in January of this year, you announced an unusual new plan that will see you recycling older strips along with newly drawn panels that “frame” the story. It sounds kind of like a “clip show” on television. Is that essentially how it will look?
A: [It will be] the original strips mixed with some newer strips. There will be some newer Sunday comic content and some new daily content, but whatever I do that is in my new style, the way that I draw now — the characters won’t age or change. So I’m going to keep them constantly the same age.
Nobody’s done [a hybrid strip] before, so it’s an experiment for me as well to see how it’s going to be managed. My drawing style is so different now, I will have to stick with shifting back and forth in time. I was thinking about expanding some of the storylines and drawing the way I used to draw, but I tried and it’s not very easy. So I think we’re going to use the website for quite a bit of that added material, so if people want to know more about other characters or storylines they’ll be able to go to the website.
I found this particular part to be quite interesting. CBC seems to know the storyline is going to end in September and October, so it is possible they have gained access to the coming hybrid strips? If so, their description of “framing panels” is different from the impression I have gotten from reading Liz interviews. Liz defines the hybrid as whole strips, and that is not quite the same as I consider a “framing panels”.
The other interesting aspect is Lynn defence of her drawing style. She still claims those drawings are hers. I still think they are too different from her original style (re: poorly done) to be hers.
In Lynn Johnston’s interview on CBC, CBC says:
After completing her current storyline in September or October, she will stop telling the continuing story of the extended Patterson family and begin running a mix of older strips and occasional newly drawn panels that will help reintroduce old storylines.
By current storyline, I presume they mean Anthony and Elizabeth getting married. It’s good to know she doesn’t plan to drag that one on forever.
Q: This “hybrid” strip seems to have caused a lot of confusion among your readers and editors. Many of them assumed you’d be retiring outright in September 2007, which you had stated publicly in several interviews over the past few years. Then in January of this year, you announced an unusual new plan that will see you recycling older strips along with newly drawn panels that “frame” the story. It sounds kind of like a “clip show” on television. Is that essentially how it will look?
A: [It will be] the original strips mixed with some newer strips. There will be some newer Sunday comic content and some new daily content, but whatever I do that is in my new style, the way that I draw now — the characters won’t age or change. So I’m going to keep them constantly the same age.
Nobody’s done [a hybrid strip] before, so it’s an experiment for me as well to see how it’s going to be managed. My drawing style is so different now, I will have to stick with shifting back and forth in time. I was thinking about expanding some of the storylines and drawing the way I used to draw, but I tried and it’s not very easy. So I think we’re going to use the website for quite a bit of that added material, so if people want to know more about other characters or storylines they’ll be able to go to the website.
I found this particular part to be quite interesting. CBC seems to know the storyline is going to end in September and October, so it is possible they have gained access to the coming hybrid strips? If so, their description of “framing panels” is different from the impression I have gotten from reading Liz interviews. Liz defines the hybrid as whole strips, and that is not quite the same as I consider a “framing panels”.
The other interesting aspect is Lynn defence of her drawing style. She still claims those drawings are hers. I still think they are too different from her original style (re: poorly done) to be hers.
posted by howard at 12:24 AM
12 Comments:
Heh, you're calling Lynn "Liz" again. ;)
I guess I'm curious about how the hybrid will play out, but I really, really hate the frozen-age element.
Thanks for the link to the CBC interview. I especially enjoyed the link within this link to the Live Journal post “Why I Hate Anthony” (http://shaenon.livejournal.com/29475.html).
BTW, I don't hyperlink or use italics in posts because your system doesn’t accept it from my Apple.
Anon NYC
aprilp_katje,
Lynn "Liz". I don't know why I do that, but I think the common denominator is it seems to happen when I write Blog entries when I am feeling very tired. Yesterday I spend almost all day on the Salt River tubing with Boy Scouts and my daughter.
As for the frozen-age element, it makes sense to a certain degree. Lynn has hinted that the new material in the hybrid is not going to carry any majour storylines (aside from Anthony and Elizabeth's marriage), and if it really is framing sequences, as CBC suggests, then a lot of what Lynn does to maintain the age increase (show people's birthdays, show majour holidays, show seasonal changes), would take up too much space. I can see it like the one sequence Lynn had where Merrie asks Mike about Farley in one strip, and then that leads into a reprint Farley story.
Anon NYC,
I was very amused by the link within the link. It shows the interviewer, or the person setting up the links for the interviewer's text, is a sneaky, snarky person.
BTW, I don't hyperlink or use italics in posts because your system doesn’t accept it from my Apple.
Interesting? I wonder why Blogger won't accept your HTML tags if it's from Apple. If you type HTML tags, what do they come out as?
howtheduck, at least you just substitute one "L" name for another--and this when you're tired. As opposed to some of the Coffee Talker commenters who write to Lynn regarding Jim, and refer to him as "your dad." Er, no Coffee Talk genius. Lynn's dad was Mervyn Ridgway. ELLY's dad is Jim.
I do understand the non-aging arguments to an extent. But why not, say, have April turn 17 and reminisce about when LIZ turned 17? Have Merrie turn five and break out the pictures from April's fifth birthday, etc.?
Lynn has argued that continuing to age the characters would mean doing two strips--a strip within a strip. I don't buy that because the past strips have already been written. Now we're looking at a non-strip within a non-strip, morelike.
BTW, my son has just decided that your blog is "Howard Bunt's Big Blog." He added in a word for you. :)
aprilp_katje,
Well, Lynn has also said that she doesn't want anyone else to die. If people kept aging, Jim and Iris would die (probably Jim sooner rather than later), and eventually the dogs would die. Of course, if she did keep aging people, Jim's death could be the framing device for flashbacks to Marian's death, Edgar's for Farley's, etc.
If you type HTML tags, what do they come out as?
I wasn’t familiar with HTML; I was just copying the text and I thought the link would copy as well. My son showed me what I was doing wrong.
sonneta, yes, now that you mention it, I remember Lynn saying that she doesn't want any more characters to die. I guess that's true enough. I'll miss the real-time aspect, though. It's always been something I've liked about the strip. ::sigh::
sonneta has a good point. Of course, the alternative is to continue to age the characters, like in Gasoline Alley, but then have such a sentimentality for the characters, like Walt Wallet, they just reach incredibly old ages without dying. I think Walt Wallet is over 100 years old now.
aprilp_katje,
Howard Bunt's Big Blog. I like it.
anonymous,
Now you know about the wonderful world of HTML, you will become an all-powerful Blog commentator. In fact when I create the Blog entry for this Blog, sometimes a cut-and-paste will copy the link. However, I always have to use HTML for the comments' links.
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