Full Circle
We started this whole For Better or For Worse strip sequence with Michael staring at Elizabeth and it appears that is how it is ending. I expect that tomorrow’s strip will be a jump back to modern Elizabeth and April concluding the storyline, but you can’t really tell. After all, the Connie Poirier storyline did not end up back with Connie, Elly and Iris.
The majour thing accomplished during the course of this 3-week run of reprints appears to be a retcon that little Michael was 5 years old when the early strips happened, not 6. Of course, the website has Michael born on April 28, 1976. This puts him at 5 in 1981. The website also has Elizabeth born on June 26, 1981; so the retcon of Michael’s age is also officially setting the early strips in 1981and not 1980. I anticipate that if we ever see a year marked on a hybrid strip, we will find that changed also.
November has been a nothing month compared to the very active October. If Lynn Johnston continues this scheme of every other month we get new material, then we will have a busy December, a reprint January and a busy February. Let’s see if I can predict the state of things in December:
a. Thanks to Christmas and Santa’s divorce from Mrs. Claus, Mike Patterson’s book will achieve astonishing sales as people seek solace in an industry completely different from toy-making, i.e. post-WWII sod farming.
b. Grandpa Jim will make the transition to Sunset Manor, still saying nothing and keeping his eyes closed like he is asleep. However Iris will interpret for him that he loves the new place and can’t wait to ogle the Sunset Manor staff girls. In the meantime, Lynn Johnston will do a lot of research on long-term care facilities and retcon all the mistakes in the first strip where she talked about it (like 2 year reservation lists), while making brand new mistakes due to her inability to follow her own notes and Polaroid pictures on the matter. Shortly thereafter, Lynn will get an award from a long-term care facility organization.
c. A Sunday strip will humorously refer to John Patterson as philanderer, a skunk, a snake or some other derogatory animal term associated with men who cheat.
d. Anthony Caine will propose to Elizabeth Patterson on New Years’ Eve using romantic language so hackneyed and a storyline so improbably put-together that the Brontës, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen will simultaneously turn in their graves. We snarkers will be in heaven.
e. There will be one speech balloon in one panel of one strip, where someone will mention that John Patterson retired and sold his business.
f. Christmas will come and Lynn Johnston will do a joke with Merrie and Robin about how they didn’t get enough presents, or a joke about Santa Claus delivering presents which Robin will interpret literally. In the meantime, we will not question why Anthony Caine and little Françoise are celebrating Christmas with the Pattersons; while Grandpa Jim, Iris and the Sobinskis are not.
g. I will cry bitter tears when Thérèse Caine does not appear.
January will be reprints, narrated by characters having little or nothing to do with the strips being reprinted.
February will have:
a. Anthony and Elizabeth get married and have their wedding corresponding to Valentine’s Day, except of course it will go all February about the events occurring on Valentine’s Day. To make matters worse, 2008 is a leap year.
b. In between the strips about the wedding, we will break off for one week to see April at school, having a conversation with Shannon Lake, who reveals she (like real-life Stephanie) has taken a trip to Washington, D.C. to talk about being special needs. Unlike real-life, the Washington, D. C. people will heap praise on Shannon and declare it Shannon Lake Day, only to change it to April Patterson Day, when Shannon informs them she couldn’t have made that trip if it weren’t for April occasionally talking to her.
c. When we return to Elizabeth’s wedding, we will discover that Anthony’s mom and dad are selfish, self-centered pigs; who happened to have picked up the entire tab for the wedding and the honeymoon. Elly and John have made the ultimate sacrifice and paid for Anne Nichols to make the cake. Anthony and Elizabeth can’t stop talking about how wonderful the cake is, and how awful the rest of their wedding was, thanks to Anthony’s parents.
d. As Anthony and Elizabeth leave for their honeymoon, John and Elly proclaim to each other, “No more kids to worry about getting married!! They high five and slap each other on the back and talk about how wonderful it will be have a new granddaughter in the house as we see April baby-sitting little Françoise while Anthony and Elizabeth take their honeymoon.
e. Anthony and Elizabeth return from their honeymoon and announce Elizabeth is pregnant. Elizabeth, Deanna and Elly all high five each other as Elizabeth says, “I don’t know how it happened.”
Let’s see how many of those predictions come true.
The majour thing accomplished during the course of this 3-week run of reprints appears to be a retcon that little Michael was 5 years old when the early strips happened, not 6. Of course, the website has Michael born on April 28, 1976. This puts him at 5 in 1981. The website also has Elizabeth born on June 26, 1981; so the retcon of Michael’s age is also officially setting the early strips in 1981and not 1980. I anticipate that if we ever see a year marked on a hybrid strip, we will find that changed also.
November has been a nothing month compared to the very active October. If Lynn Johnston continues this scheme of every other month we get new material, then we will have a busy December, a reprint January and a busy February. Let’s see if I can predict the state of things in December:
a. Thanks to Christmas and Santa’s divorce from Mrs. Claus, Mike Patterson’s book will achieve astonishing sales as people seek solace in an industry completely different from toy-making, i.e. post-WWII sod farming.
b. Grandpa Jim will make the transition to Sunset Manor, still saying nothing and keeping his eyes closed like he is asleep. However Iris will interpret for him that he loves the new place and can’t wait to ogle the Sunset Manor staff girls. In the meantime, Lynn Johnston will do a lot of research on long-term care facilities and retcon all the mistakes in the first strip where she talked about it (like 2 year reservation lists), while making brand new mistakes due to her inability to follow her own notes and Polaroid pictures on the matter. Shortly thereafter, Lynn will get an award from a long-term care facility organization.
c. A Sunday strip will humorously refer to John Patterson as philanderer, a skunk, a snake or some other derogatory animal term associated with men who cheat.
d. Anthony Caine will propose to Elizabeth Patterson on New Years’ Eve using romantic language so hackneyed and a storyline so improbably put-together that the Brontës, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen will simultaneously turn in their graves. We snarkers will be in heaven.
e. There will be one speech balloon in one panel of one strip, where someone will mention that John Patterson retired and sold his business.
f. Christmas will come and Lynn Johnston will do a joke with Merrie and Robin about how they didn’t get enough presents, or a joke about Santa Claus delivering presents which Robin will interpret literally. In the meantime, we will not question why Anthony Caine and little Françoise are celebrating Christmas with the Pattersons; while Grandpa Jim, Iris and the Sobinskis are not.
g. I will cry bitter tears when Thérèse Caine does not appear.
January will be reprints, narrated by characters having little or nothing to do with the strips being reprinted.
February will have:
a. Anthony and Elizabeth get married and have their wedding corresponding to Valentine’s Day, except of course it will go all February about the events occurring on Valentine’s Day. To make matters worse, 2008 is a leap year.
b. In between the strips about the wedding, we will break off for one week to see April at school, having a conversation with Shannon Lake, who reveals she (like real-life Stephanie) has taken a trip to Washington, D.C. to talk about being special needs. Unlike real-life, the Washington, D. C. people will heap praise on Shannon and declare it Shannon Lake Day, only to change it to April Patterson Day, when Shannon informs them she couldn’t have made that trip if it weren’t for April occasionally talking to her.
c. When we return to Elizabeth’s wedding, we will discover that Anthony’s mom and dad are selfish, self-centered pigs; who happened to have picked up the entire tab for the wedding and the honeymoon. Elly and John have made the ultimate sacrifice and paid for Anne Nichols to make the cake. Anthony and Elizabeth can’t stop talking about how wonderful the cake is, and how awful the rest of their wedding was, thanks to Anthony’s parents.
d. As Anthony and Elizabeth leave for their honeymoon, John and Elly proclaim to each other, “No more kids to worry about getting married!! They high five and slap each other on the back and talk about how wonderful it will be have a new granddaughter in the house as we see April baby-sitting little Françoise while Anthony and Elizabeth take their honeymoon.
e. Anthony and Elizabeth return from their honeymoon and announce Elizabeth is pregnant. Elizabeth, Deanna and Elly all high five each other as Elizabeth says, “I don’t know how it happened.”
Let’s see how many of those predictions come true.
posted by howard at 10:52 PM
15 Comments:
My fears say al of them are too plausible not to come to pass. That's because Lynn's mind is far and away too easy to read. When the horrors you've described are unleashed upon an unhappy world, the two-legged sheep who blight the mislabeled mailbag called 'Elly's Coffee Talk Blog' will shower her with cretinous praise.
The majour thing accomplished during the course of this 3-week run of reprints appears to be a retcon that little Michael was 5 years old when the early strips happened, not 6.
Today's strip actually did have "5" in the original. The one that was retconned from six to five occurred 15 (daily) strips later. Based on its proximity to a Halloween strip, today's strip would have run in early November of 1979. The one where Elly feels she's being treated like a 6/5-year-old would have been late November. So I suppose Lynn, in the first year of her strip, couldn't be arsed to keep track of her characters' ages within the course of a month of strips!
Your predictions seem eerily plausible, as usual. ;)
howtheduck, in answer to your question yesterday, Aaron's marriage did not yield any children, so yes--it's reasonable to speculate that Michael's parenting reflects Rod's.
Oh God. Who wants to bet that Pornstache pops the question on Christmas because it's like soooo romantic and stuff?
dlauthor,
That would make sense- then Lynn could do lots of "this is the perfect gift!" type puns.
Sonneta and dlauthor,
Christmas puns would be great, but I think New Years’ Eve because (a) that’s when Mike did it and (b) Elizabeth and Anthony have a lot of history over New Years’ Eve parties.
aprilp_katje,
So I suppose Lynn, in the first year of her strip, couldn't be arsed to keep track of her characters' ages within the course of a month of strips!
Considering the moveable stripes on Michael’s shirt today from panel to panel in the same strip, this fact is not surprising to me in the least. If she couldn’t be arsed to count stripes on a shirt from panel to panel, checking a fact from one strip to another strip would be out of the question. I would like to think she has gotten better at this with time, but the Thérèse and Anthony love story retcon was filled with inaccuracies, which could have been easily checked.
DreadedCandiru2
When the horrors you've described are unleashed upon an unhappy world, the two-legged sheep who blight the mislabeled mailbag called 'Elly's Coffee Talk Blog' will shower her with cretinous praise.
Considering everything I said is a repetition of something Lynn has done before in the strip, I would fully expect the Coffee Talk people to enjoy it. I, however, would hope that, like me, they would cry if Thérèse Caine did not make a reappearance, before Anthony and Elizabeth got married.
That way, they can boo and hiss at her for doing things like wondering why she was tossed aside for a pallid twit and demonized by small-minded lumpen-bourgeois clods because of her distinct lack of enthusiasm for validating her husband's inertia.
dreadedcandiru2,
I suppose they can boo and hiss at her, but my hope and dream is to see little Françoise call Elizabeth "mommy" and not know who Thérèse is, as Thérèse weeps for having “thrown away” such a wonderful husband and daughter. Even better, if Thérèse tells Elizabeth that she will be the perfect mother for little Françoise, whom Françoise deserves to have as a mom, and that Elizabeth will be a much better mom than Thérèse would ever hope to be. Oh, and after that, Thérèse will apologize to Elizabeth for being jealous of her all those years, and nearly ruining her “friendship” with Anthony. That would be perfect. If I got strips where that happened, I wouldn’t care what anyone in the Coffee Talk thought. It would be snark heaven.
I just know Lynn Johnston can do that for me. After all, she was the one who made Anthony and Elizabeth's get together at Shawna-Marie's wedding include ballet moves with a mummified-looking Elizabeth and running through roses barefooted. Surely she can do this little thing for me.
..and when all this happens you just have to wonder "Is Lynn REALLY that stupid, or is she doing this to feel superior to those readers who gush about her wonderful strip?"
It's just beyond comprehension that someone who comes across as cynical and manipulative as LJ is really not laughing at the adoring fans.
DJ
Elizabeth, Deanna and Elly all high five each other as Elizabeth says, “I don’t know how it happened.”
Too funny!
Anon NYC
DJ,
I don’t get “cynical and manipulative” from Lynn Johnston. The interviews I see with Lynn Johnston, she usually comes across as pretty friendly, although she does occasionally vector off into a strange direction. For example, she talked to the Chicago Tribune guy about reprinting the “Elly dreams John cheats” reprint Sunday strip, particularly with “Rod cheated” in mind. No problems there. She’s running the strip out of revenge for what Rod did to her. It’s tasteless, but straightforward. The flight of fancy occurs when she then said, “The girls at [my] studio thought it was appropriate, and we all kind of smiled and said, yes, let's run it." I didn’t believe that statement for one instant.
As for her fans, we have gotten some indication that Lynn takes the fans’ issues personally. I am pretty sure the retcon of the Thérèse / Anthony marital relationship was in direct response to the fans’ criticism of that storyline. Otherwise, there would have been no need to rewrite it. It certainly did not fit in with anything else going on.
Sometimes I think when Lynn writes, she has ideas in her head about the characters which she is not putting across in the strip, and she doesn’t grasp that these ideas are not there. The difficulty with the situation I have proposed for the return of Thérèse is not so much that Lynn is really stupid, but that she has failed to realize that showing Elizabeth on a couple of park dates with Anthony and Françoise, or even Françoise telling Anthony that they should keep Elizabeth, like she were a puppy; does not show that Elizabeth has ever acted like an adult or a potential parent to Françoise, or that she would be good in that role. In fact, the 2 park date scenarios missed that opportunity because they showed Elizabeth ignoring Françoise in favour of Anthony. Françoise plays in the park alone, while Liz and Anthony cuddle on the bench and watch her. Elizabeth curbs Françoise’s enthusiasm with an offer of ice cream. These are not parenting moments. Moreover, the last Liz / Anthony appearance was with Elizabeth upset over Grandpa Jim’s stroke #2 and what April told her about the harmonica, and there was no Françoise. Another missed opportunity. What if Elizabeth went to Anthony’s house seeking comfort and was comforted not just by Anthony, but also by Françoise?
If Thérèse arrives on the scene, and Françoise claims Elizabeth as a better mother, I won’t have seen it, as it stands now. But in Lynn Johnston’s mind, that relationship would be there, and it would make sense to her. I don’t see her laughing at her fans when she writes things like this; but I do see her not realizing how poor the writing is, because she has a backstory in her head which is not on the page.
Anon NYC,
It's funny, but after reading the similar comment Elly made on her first pregnancy that Deanna made for hers, I honestly would not be surprised if Elizabeth comes back from her honeymoon pregnant. That seems to be a theme for the Patterson women.
I do see her not realizing how poor the writing is, because she has a backstory in her head which is not on the page.
That's the problem with the strip, right there; she doesn't, as you've said, see things from the readers' perspectives any longer. She used to be able to put herself in the place of the person reading things but, for some readon, lost the ability to do so. She knows what's supposed to be happening and thus doesn't see the need to explain what we're seeing. She's forgotten we don't know what she does.
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