Sunday to Monday
As far as the content goes, there is some similarity between Sunday’s and today’s For Better or For Worse. Today’s reprint is without Elly, and I am beginning to appreciate the strips which do not include Elly more and more. The relentless bad parenting she represents wears on you after awhile.
Farley – Sunday’s strip showed the benefit that Lynn Johnston has in hindsight of knowing how Farley is going to end up looking. Although Lynn can’t draw a consistent dog body to save her life, she had the fur texture and basic head shape pretty well down. In the Monday strip, that idea still seems to be in development, as Farley’s muzzle shape and length seems to vary from panel-to-panel.
Michael – New-run Michael and reprint Michael are not that far apart in appearance. In the Monday strip reprint, you can see the resemblance in head shape to Linus van Pelt from Peanuts, but the images are close enough to get the idea who he is.
Elizabeth - The images are significantly different. If I did not know that the little girl in today’s For Better or For Worse was supposed to be the same as the little girl in yesterday’s strip, I never would have guessed it. In the reprint, the picture is clearly a lift off of Sally Brown from Peanuts, but in the Sunday strip, the little girl with the giant mouth constantly open and the enormous eyes looks almost nothing like her.
The plotline: Sunday’s strip was Elly’s desire for her children to get tired and stop playing. Today’s For Better or For Worse is so very close to Sally Brown tackling Linus van Pelt and calling him her “Sweet Babboo”, I am surprised Charles Schulz did not make a bigger stink about the blatant copying. However, I find that I am still charmed by the idea of the strip, and I think mainly because there is no Elly interruption. Here is something 2 kids and a puppy may actually do, for a change. Not only that, but it is a strip that is timeless. You can probably read this strip 20 years from now and it will still play well. Charles Schulz was really good at writing those kinds of stories.
Farley – Sunday’s strip showed the benefit that Lynn Johnston has in hindsight of knowing how Farley is going to end up looking. Although Lynn can’t draw a consistent dog body to save her life, she had the fur texture and basic head shape pretty well down. In the Monday strip, that idea still seems to be in development, as Farley’s muzzle shape and length seems to vary from panel-to-panel.
Michael – New-run Michael and reprint Michael are not that far apart in appearance. In the Monday strip reprint, you can see the resemblance in head shape to Linus van Pelt from Peanuts, but the images are close enough to get the idea who he is.
Elizabeth - The images are significantly different. If I did not know that the little girl in today’s For Better or For Worse was supposed to be the same as the little girl in yesterday’s strip, I never would have guessed it. In the reprint, the picture is clearly a lift off of Sally Brown from Peanuts, but in the Sunday strip, the little girl with the giant mouth constantly open and the enormous eyes looks almost nothing like her.
The plotline: Sunday’s strip was Elly’s desire for her children to get tired and stop playing. Today’s For Better or For Worse is so very close to Sally Brown tackling Linus van Pelt and calling him her “Sweet Babboo”, I am surprised Charles Schulz did not make a bigger stink about the blatant copying. However, I find that I am still charmed by the idea of the strip, and I think mainly because there is no Elly interruption. Here is something 2 kids and a puppy may actually do, for a change. Not only that, but it is a strip that is timeless. You can probably read this strip 20 years from now and it will still play well. Charles Schulz was really good at writing those kinds of stories.
posted by howard at 10:25 PM
5 Comments:
A strip which provides further evidence that the new-runs don't work. It's executed simply and stands the test of time. Last week's echo added nothing to the backstory except for questions about Liz's strange shape-shifting abilities and why Elly cleans kids while they're eating. Are these new-runs really adding to the original story or just padding it?
Oh, padding it, of course. When Lynn said she wanted to add to the story she meant she wanted to add bulk, not depth.
Padding it, but padding it to a theme. The theme from last week is that Elly Patterson is solely responsible for young Farley the dog.
Originally you had Mike and Lawrence around young Farley the dog standing in newspapers and going over a fence to get to him. Originally you saw Elly shrieking at Farley to do his business in the grass. But now we get to see that Elly is responsible for putting down those newspapers, and for putting up the fenced-in area, and for providing a previously-unseen cage, and for taking the dog on walks. Maybe if you read the strip before, you might have gotten the idea that perhaps John Patterson helped out setting this stuff up, or that the kids helped clean up after the dog. You might have “filled in the lines” that just because you didn’t see them do it, they might have done it. Thanks to the new-runs, we know that the long-suffering Elly Patterson is doing every single bit of it herself, including taking the dog for a walk in a snow storm with her daughter strapped on her back and going uphill both ways.
The overarching theme is that Elly Patterson is now a supermom. If you had read the strip back in 1980, you might have gotten the impression that Elly was a regular mom you identified with and Anne Nichols was the supermom like some women you knew who irritated you with their efficiency. You might have seen Elly get frustrated because her house was constantly messy or angry with herself at making parenting mistakes. If you were also a mom, you might have looked at those strips with empathy and said, “Elly Patterson has the same struggles I do.” You might have wondered 29 years later how it was that Elly could possibly spend so much time with Connie Poirier complimenting herself on what a wonderful parent she was.
Well, now, thanks to the new-runs, we get to go back and see all the stuff we didn’t get to see before, which showed us just how great Elly was as a mom. She didn’t really have any flaws at all. She worked so hard to keep the house clean that she only had time read the headlines of the newspaper that she dutifully set out for her husband to read when he came home at night. She is now the mom who likes her children quiet, and too tired to play or to make any noises. She is no longer the fun mom. She is the mom who sacrificed and sacrificed and sacrificed, and no one appreciated it. Not her kids, and especially not her slimy dentist husband who ran off with another woman, which is her motivation for doing virtually every strip for the last 18 months. This is the true reason for the new-runs, as far as I can tell.
I'm also wondering if part of the new-runs purpose is to give Lynn more strips to run in new collections. Since her entire empire seems to be centered on Farley, this might make up for the lack of strips until he became St. Farley.
DebJyn
DebJyn,
I'm also wondering if part of the new-runs purpose is to give Lynn more strips to run in new collections.
That's a good point. We know she is pushing the Farley calendar and the Farley children's book; but an all Farley collection could well allow her to publish again after she publishes the collection with the last modern strip with the wedding. It will be very interesting to see just how long and how often she does Farley-oriented strips in the next year.
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