Elizabeth is Dirty
Oddly enough, the theme I see emerging for this week in For Better or For Worse is the idea that Elizabeth is filthy. Yesterday we saw that Michael much preferred the licking of young Farley the dog to his sister Elizabeth’s kisses, and in today’s For Better or For Worse, we get another hint why. Elly Patterson is lamenting that she only gave Elizabeth one cookie, and yet Elizabeth managed to make messes clearly beyond the capability of any human to create with just one cookie. What kind of cookie is there which allows a little girl to make 5 full-size hand prints? I could probably dip my daughter’s hand in India ink and she would be hard-pressed to do as much damage. Also, there are 4 splattery-looking messes that would require a liquid object to make the mess.
It makes little sense unless you consider the old story of Jesus and the fish and the loaves. If you are unfamiliar with the story, Jesus gets some fish and loaves of bread from a boy carrying them for his own supper and breaks them into pieces and hands them to his (Jesus’) disciples to give out to people who have come to listen to Jesus teach. When the disciples come back, they miraculously have fed all the people and yet managed to have even more fish and loaves left over than when they started. Perhaps Lynn Johnston has drawn Elly sitting in her chair contemplating this matter because Elizabeth has done something very similar. She only gave her one cookie, but Lizzie managed to create a mess that would have required not only far more than one cookie, but also other non-cookie-like materials. Not only that, but Lizzie appears to be in some kind of half lotus pose, either blankly staring at her mother or contemplating the full range of her destructive power with cute, circular confections.
Join us tomorrow as we see just how disgustingly filthy little Lizzie can get. In fact, stick around for the whole week to see how many ways Lynn Johnston can do jokes on this theme.
It makes little sense unless you consider the old story of Jesus and the fish and the loaves. If you are unfamiliar with the story, Jesus gets some fish and loaves of bread from a boy carrying them for his own supper and breaks them into pieces and hands them to his (Jesus’) disciples to give out to people who have come to listen to Jesus teach. When the disciples come back, they miraculously have fed all the people and yet managed to have even more fish and loaves left over than when they started. Perhaps Lynn Johnston has drawn Elly sitting in her chair contemplating this matter because Elizabeth has done something very similar. She only gave her one cookie, but Lizzie managed to create a mess that would have required not only far more than one cookie, but also other non-cookie-like materials. Not only that, but Lizzie appears to be in some kind of half lotus pose, either blankly staring at her mother or contemplating the full range of her destructive power with cute, circular confections.
Join us tomorrow as we see just how disgustingly filthy little Lizzie can get. In fact, stick around for the whole week to see how many ways Lynn Johnston can do jokes on this theme.
posted by howard at 12:12 AM
8 Comments:
The unrelenting message is that kids are always a horrible, enormous burden. There is never a happy or enjoyable moment. It is just unrelenting drudgery because your baby is filthy and your little boy is an evil brat.
So, Elizabeth = Pigpen. More stealing from Peanuts?
qnjones,
The unrelenting message is that kids are always a horrible, enormous burden. There is never a happy or enjoyable moment. It is just unrelenting drudgery because your baby is filthy and your little boy is an evil brat.
Elly did have the occasional moment of lucidity where she realized that she wasted her life thinking along those lines; unfortunately, her need to martyr herself saved her from having to think like a human being fairly quickly. Some minor thing would happen and she'd be back to biting phone books.
There is never a happy or enjoyable moment.
Too true, qnjones. The strip should be called For Worse and Worst.
howtheduck, when I started to read today's entry, my first thought was that if we were still doing ARB, your Michael would have explained yesterday's strip as a reaction to Nizzie's toxic Lizardbreath. :)
To be fair, this strip does cater directly to Lynn's target market: depressed housewives who regret having children and have long since seen their capacity for joy replaced by creeping numbness and mug-slinging rage.
qnjones,
So, Elizabeth = Pigpen. More stealing from Peanuts?
It could be. I remember a similar moment when Pigpen had gotten a bath and was, for a very brief moment, not surrounded by a cloud of dust.
DreadedCandiru2,
Elly did have the occasional moment of lucidity where she realized that she wasted her life thinking along those lines; unfortunately, her need to martyr herself saved her from having to think like a human being fairly quickly.
Kind of like The Lockhorns, who would occasionally have a strip where they liked each other.
aprilp_katje,
howtheduck, when I started to read today's entry, my first thought was that if we were still doing ARB, your Michael would have explained yesterday's strip as a reaction to Nizzie's toxic Lizardbreath. :)
Shockingly enough, I had the very same thought when I saw yesterday’s strip.
dlauthor,
To be fair, this strip does cater directly to Lynn's target market: depressed housewives who regret having children and have long since seen their capacity for joy replaced by creeping numbness and mug-slinging rage.
The target market doesn’t even have to be that depressed or filled with rage. The unrelenting drudgery part of this strip comes from viewing it again and again over a long period of time. If you, for example, read For Better or For Worse and then balanced it with a strip where the parents like their impossibly cute kids as in The Family Circus on a daily basis, it wouldn’t be so bad. You could just be a housewife who sometimes got depressed or filled with rage at your kids, and For Better or For Worse could touch that particular nerve. Did your kids just do something rotten? Read For Better or For Worse. Did your kids just do something impossibly cute? Read The Family Circus
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