Raking It In
Comparing the art in yesterday’s new-run and today’s reprint in For Better or For Worse, Lynn appears to have made a real effort to imitate the style of drawing John Patterson’s head at least. She has captured the moveable cleft in his chin quite nicely. As for fleshing out the story with the new-run and reprint combination, we now know that instead of going out and raking leaves as one of his regular chores, Elly handed John a rake. As for the reprint itself, we see a theme, which I can honestly say has not been repeated much in the annals of For Better or For Worse, i.e. John trying to convince young Mike to do one of his chores for him, using a famous literary example, in this case Tom Sawyer's white-washing the fence.
You can tell this strip was from Lynn’s younger days when she took things more from real stories than from making things up. I have tried to convince my children to do things they did not want to do, by making it seem more appealing with my enjoyment of it. For example, vacuuming carpets. My kids like pushing a vacuum pretty well, and have enjoyed it ever since their early days, but mainly because I made a game of chasing them with it. I can easily see a real-life Rod Johnston trying to convince Aaron that raking was fun and not tedious; and not fooling Aaron one bit. It makes for a nice slice-of-life moment, even though Lynn Johnston is playing it as though John Patterson is trying to get his son to do his work for him, with the Tom Sawyer reference.
As for Tom Sawyer, the method actually is for kids to ask Tom to do things with them (fishing, usually), and Tom refuses because he claims to be enjoying white-washing the fence so much. In order to get a direct comparison, Mike would have to ask John to do something with him, and John refuse because he enjoys raking so much. However, John Patterson is close enough for the Tom Sawyer reference to work, even if it isn’t exact.
You can tell this strip was from Lynn’s younger days when she took things more from real stories than from making things up. I have tried to convince my children to do things they did not want to do, by making it seem more appealing with my enjoyment of it. For example, vacuuming carpets. My kids like pushing a vacuum pretty well, and have enjoyed it ever since their early days, but mainly because I made a game of chasing them with it. I can easily see a real-life Rod Johnston trying to convince Aaron that raking was fun and not tedious; and not fooling Aaron one bit. It makes for a nice slice-of-life moment, even though Lynn Johnston is playing it as though John Patterson is trying to get his son to do his work for him, with the Tom Sawyer reference.
As for Tom Sawyer, the method actually is for kids to ask Tom to do things with them (fishing, usually), and Tom refuses because he claims to be enjoying white-washing the fence so much. In order to get a direct comparison, Mike would have to ask John to do something with him, and John refuse because he enjoys raking so much. However, John Patterson is close enough for the Tom Sawyer reference to work, even if it isn’t exact.
posted by howard at 10:26 PM
4 Comments:
howard,
You can tell this strip was from Lynn’s younger days when she took things more from real stories than from making things up.
It seems to me that the greater honesty of the old material might start to get the fan base to ask themselves where her talent went. Too bad she turned Coffee Talk into a comment of the week thing. That way, they won't realize they have company.
dreadedcandiru2,
I expect I will miss the Coffee Talk too; but I must admit that the person doing it lately let in very few negative comments, aside from those that said, "You're wonderful Lynn, but can we have those old characters back?" It was tedious. I can understand why they dropped it, if Lynn was not interested in hearing anything about her recent work than that.
As for where Lynn's talent went, on the old CBC documentary from when she was living in Lynn Lake, she seemed to be taking stories from her own experience and the people around her. I remember her making a comment back then about how became shy about telling her things going on in their lives, for fear it would end up in her strip.
She still didn't have the ability to start making things up on her own. The strip was always the weakest when all the characters are about Lynn. The strength of the strip was that "You must have a camera in my house" that she gets from telling stories common to a lot of people AND the real-time aging of her characters. As long as she could crib stories from real life and occasionally remind people of the seasons or holidays, then you have the strip in a nutshell. While the other strips are trying to make people laugh, Lynn does a strip series on Grandpa having a stroke.
Now we have the new-runs, where we get all kinds of unusual questions answered about those old strips: How did John get that rake he was using? Did Connie really criticize how Elly treated John?
What I am curious about now is whether Lynn is going to go every other day like the last 4 days with new-run / reprint?
howard,
Now we have the new-runs, where we get all kinds of unusual questions answered about those old strips: How did John get that rake he was using? Did Connie really criticize how Elly treated John?
In short, we're being subjected to things we don't really need to see. If Elly says that Connie criticized how she treated John, we could assume without having to see it that she did. Only the most simple minds would need to be shown Connie telling Elly off. The sort of simple mind, it seems, that actually buys into the thirty-second excuse.
dreadedcandiru2,
What we will get instead is this sequence:
1. Lynn looks at the reprint strip.
2. Lynn tries to figure out something that could happen before it.
This way, she doesn't have to work so hard to be original. She can leverage off every reprint. Lynn is very clever in her aim not to be clever.
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