The Dreaded Fear of Looking Like Mom Part 2
In today’s For Better or For Worse Elly starts to go through body parts to pick spots where she looks like Gramma Marian. Ultimately, John pops in out of nowhere with the feeling he looks like his father. John has always looked exactly like his father except taller and except with the dominant cleft in his chin which came from his mother. Or rather I should say it came from the early version of his mother. When I look at the strips shown in the Who’s Who section of the For Better or For Worse website under Carrie Patterson, it appears that as time went on her hair got curlier and the cleft in her chin disappeared. I suspect she got old, got a perm, and had a little face work done.
In stark contrast, thanks to the hybrid reprints from 1979, we can see that young Elly looked almost nothing like her mother or father. As time went on, Elly adopted the bun of her mother, and they both developed the rounded face (instead of the pear shape of 1979 for Elly) and turnip nose.
In stark contrast, thanks to the hybrid reprints from 1979, we can see that young Elly looked almost nothing like her mother or father. As time went on, Elly adopted the bun of her mother, and they both developed the rounded face (instead of the pear shape of 1979 for Elly) and turnip nose.
posted by howard at 10:20 PM
8 Comments:
That's what makes John's hypocrisy all the worse, I should think. There he is, virtually a twin of his dad his whole adult life and he can't, or more likely won't, see it until he's an old man. We've all met people who are at pains to not admit their close resemblance to another person. John is most likely one of them. Good thing for him he married a woman who had the same quirk. I'd say that back in the early seventies, Elly spent many a sleepless night obsessing over an ugly fact she saw in the Richards family album: the Marian Jim married looked almost exclty like she did.
dreadedcandiru2,
Well the standard Cathy joke is where Cathy is distraught because she looks like her mom and mom is, of course, delighted.
As for Elly, when I look at 1980s Elly and Marian, I see little resemblance. They both seem to have evolved that potato/muppet nose over the same period of time.
Of course, since the For Better or For Worse has a picture of Lynn Johnston's mom in it, it seems clear to me that early Marian and Richard were closely based on the actual image of Lynn's parents, and later on she started drawing them to be more cartoony, and less like their real selves.
I think that as she started to make Elly into what she is now, she decided that it made sense to make Marian resemble what Elly feared becoming. We thus started out with two realistic looking people that didn't look alike with two cartoony clones.
I wonder why Lynn became obsessed with the idea of swelling the noses of her (usually older) characters? Does she think that giant turnip nose = sign of aging? I mean, yes, noses do actually continue to grow throughout life, so old people have bigger noses. But I have yet to see even one middle-aged person walking around with a proboscis so huge that it's like a big floppy turnip sewn to their face.
I actually think that the last panel is meant to show John not just as a hypocrite, but as a total idiot/buffoon. Lynn is not done trashing the John character...for whatever reason. ;)
The giant potato noses baffle me, too. Lynn always says that her style has evolved and become more realistic over the years, but the huge honkers are more cartoonish than the noses she used to do.
One of the major reasons that the giant noses bug me:
At first, I thought it was kind of a nice way of indicating that these people were all sort of average-looking folks, and that the point was to say that great beauty is not an integral part of a good marriage or happy family life. (This was before I really thought critically about FOOB.)
But then you see that there are characters who got a "turnip nose exemption." All the Patterson kids have very Hollywood-tiny noses. So we are supposed to believe that two very average-looking people with giant honkers turned out three above-average attractive children with tiny, Hollywood noses. (This is excepting the times when Lynn intentionally draws them to look hideous, like after a night of drinking.) And it leads us to ask--why would Lynn do that?
I think the only answer is that, in Lynn's mind, "success = having beautiful children." It's not just the Pattersons--big-nose average/ugly people in this strip who we are supposed to think are nice always get very attractive kids. This seems to destroy any idea that people can be worthwhile and even attractive and lovable without being beautiful.
It is even weirder when we look back 10-15 years and see li'l 'Pril with her round nose, Liz in her shaggy dog phase, etc. They looked like average kids from average people, and especially the Liz awkwardness came across as very real. The teens in the strip now do not seem to suffer through awkward phases. It's like a new shallowness has come over Lynn in her old age. It's fine to be average looking if you're not a Patterson kid--see Gordo and Anthony. But, by God, the Pattersons had to turn out looking like they were carved from cream cheese! It just seems like such a weird exception from her usual strip message, and it's hard to figure out her rationale.
liz patterson:
You've just made my argument for me, more or less. The Liz of the early nineties was more sympathetic because she wasn't a child model. She was an average-looking teenager who was part of a nice, average family with average worries that anyone could identify with. The prettier she got, the less people cared.
So true.
Oh, and liz patterson = qnjones. I just forgot and signed it wrong.
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