Monday, January 05, 2009

Farewell to Phil

As I was looking at today’s reprint of For Better or For Worse, a curious interpretation occurred to me. We see Phil and Michael in 3 of the 4 panels alone, but the 3rd panel is a silent penultimate panel with Elly and John and Lizzie there looking on at Phil and Michael. The traditional use of a silent penultimate panel is to let you know that there is something visual in the panel which influences the timing of the story or the punch line of the strip. In this case, the punch line is Mike’s response to Phil’s statement “Big boys don’t cry!” Mike says, “How big is big?”

I looked at that response from Mike with respect to the additional visual in the silent penultimate panel, and realized that Mike’s questioning response is related to his family. They are the additional visual not present in any other panel. It occurred to me that Mike does not want Uncle Phil to leave not because he will miss Uncle Phil. Mike doesn’t want Uncle Phil to leave, because Mike is being left with John and Elly and Lizzie. After 29 years of reading this strip, I can see his point.

The next part is Mike’s question. “How big is big?” Obviously, the teary Mike does not consider himself to be big at that moment. If you take the logic to the next step, Mike, after looking at his family, could anticipate crying for many more years to come. You could interpret Mike’s question to mean, “At what point am I expected to be big enough to stop crying over the fact you are leaving me with John and Elly and Lizzie, because it’s not happening any time soon?”

As for the actual plot line of Mike weeping over Phil’s departure, this is where we really could have used a new-run to give us an idea of why Mike is so emotional. We saw Phil make pizza for Mike (and the rest of the family). Perhaps Mike is tearful over being forced to eat Elly's diet cooking again; but if that were the case, then Lizzie and John would be crying too.

We saw Phil take Mike to see Santa, but we did not see what happened there. We saw Phil take Mike to visit Lawrence, but we did not see what happened there. There were Mike and Phil bonding moments, but each time we saw them leaving and nothing about what happened. Instead of all that nothing, imagine how much understandable Mike's tears would be, if we had seen strips like these:

Strip #1

Phil: So, what did you ask Santa to give you for Christmas?
Mike: I asked Santa to make Deanna Soblinski fall in love with me.
Phil: Deanna Sobinski? Who’s that?
Mike: She’s in my class. We are going to get married and have children and live together in Milborough.
Phil: How old are you?
Mike: 6
Phil: You look like you’re 6, but you sound like your dialogue was written by your mother.

Strip #2:

Phil: You want to marry this Deanna Sobinksi girl. What if she moves?
Mike: What do you mean?
Phil: What if her parents get a job in some other town and moved?
Mike: I think I’ll kill myself.
Phil: Why would you do that?
Mike: Mom says since she got married, unmarried men are dead to her.

Strip #3

Phil: Instead of marrying Deanna Sobinksi, you should try some other girls first to experiment. What about that elf over there?
Mike: Deanna is prettier.
Phil: How about the girl standing behind Santa? What do you think of her?
Mike: Deanna is prettier.
Phil: How about that greasy-looking kid, carrying a camera, with the potato nose, dark glasses, wearing that all black Weeder Industries shirt? I’ll bet he’s not as good as Deanna either, eh?
Mike: Deanna who?

Strip #4

Mike: Mom wants you to meet my friend Lawrence's mom.
Phil: Is she pretty?
Mike: Deanna is prettier.
Phil: Is she the kind of desperate, crazy, single woman who would follow me back to Montreal and surprise me?
Mike: Oh, yeah!
Phil: Then why should I meet her?
Mike: Lawrence says most men tell him they like his mom because she is easy.
Phil: Great!

Strip #5

Phil: Did you say your friend Lawrence says most men tell him they like his mom because she is easy.
Mike: Yes, what does "easy" mean?
Phil: Ask your mother.
Mike: No, really.
Phil: It means it would be easy to have a nice visit with Lawrence's mom.
Mike: How easy?
Phil: I'll let you know after we visit her.

11 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

howard,

It occurred to me that Mike does not want Uncle Phil to leave not because he will miss Uncle Phil. Mike doesn’t want Uncle Phil to leave, because Mike is being left with John and Elly and Lizzie. After 29 years of reading this strip, I can see his point.

That means we might as well have seen this:

Mike: Take me with you.
Phil:[lights pipe]Sorry, man.
[Phil saunters off as Mike hangs his head down. He then turns, removes his shirt, tosses it to Mike and says]
Phil: Here, Kid.
{Mike sniffs it with an ecstatic look on his face.]

Of course, this would mean that tomorrow he'd ask Doctor Venture how his, uh, speech thing went before checking out the local action but it'd be better than what we saw.

As for your take on events, it's way better than anything Lynn came up with in like forever.

3:53 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

howard,

To get serious, I can readily see why Mike would want to leave the Pattermanse. This was before he'd been totally ruined by years of exposure to two different varieties of incompetent parenting; back then, he could see the writing on the wall that said "You will grow up to be a ludicrous dolt who will write awful novels and leave your family on a rickety fire escape while you rush into a burning building to rescue a laptop you value more than them." He wanted out before he became the Delicate Genius. It's too bad that he started envying Lizzie her hapless dependence; by focusing on something he shouldn't have, he lost the ability to see the doom that was stalking him.

3:59 AM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

Great Dr. Venture take on it.

He wanted out before he became the Delicate Genius.

Yes, it could be very much in aprilp_katje's FOOBar sense, where Mike remembers what he was before and is desperate to stop it from happening again. It would make more sense that way. My kids have been visited by grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins many times over the years and never has any of them leaving caused my children to start weeping. Even without the Delicate Genius possibility, you would have to wonder what it was about Phil that caused such an extreme reaction with Mike.

6:05 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting that there are no new run strips between the Phil/Connie one night stand and Phil's departure. Not only could Lynn have fleshed out their relationship a little, but she could have made Phil and Connie look better. Now Phil looks like a jerk who sneaks out of town after screwing a single mother, and Connie looks desperate and slutty.

Then again, maybe that's how Lynn wants us to see them.

Random thought: Why didn't Lynn ultimately marry Phil to Connie? Both characters eventually got married to other people. Both Greg and Georgia were blah nothings of characters that only symbolized the "settling down" and "wedded bliss" of Phil and Connie. I think it could have been more interesting to see Phil develop a relationship with Lawrence, especially since Lynn (Beth?) later retconned that Phil wanted kids but couldn't have them. And Connie and Phil might have been pretty good for each other in the sense that Connie is relatively independent for a FOOB woman and might not have minded if he did some traveling as a musician.

Since Lynn claims to be so against bringing in new characters...why not Phil and Connie? Just makes me wonder. Of course, then Lynn would have had a harder time kicking both those characters out of the strip, which she did, although Connie returned.

I also have to wonder what her motivations were for kicking Phil and Connie out. It seems like she loses interest in almost all of the non-Patterson nuclear family characters after awhile, dumps them, and then occasionally brings them back. So maybe it was just boredom.

7:59 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

qnjones,

Not only could Lynn have fleshed out their relationship a little, but she could have made Phil and Connie look better. Now Phil looks like a jerk who sneaks out of town after screwing a single mother, and Connie looks desperate and slutty.

Then again, maybe that's how Lynn wants us to see them.


I think it's safe to say that you could probably drop the word "maybe" from the last sentence. Lynn clearly wants us to identify with the Pattersons and the way they live their lives; if that means diversity can be confused with deviancy, that's just the way things unfold.

8:48 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

You look like you’re 6, but you sound like your dialogue was written by your mother.

My favorite line! :)

8:53 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

Since Lynn claims to be so against bringing in new characters...why not Phil and Connie?

I forget where the discussion was--somewhere on a LiveJournal where there was a FBoFW-related entry. But in any event, someone who self-identified as a former student of Alan Ridgway's (Lynn's brother) claimed that AR hated the way LJ depicted Phil and that this was why Phil receded into the background after having had more prominence in earlier strips. If this is true, this could have had something to do with LJ not electing to have the Phil/Connie relationship end up with their marrying. Also, LJ has said that Connie was partially based on a rather stern art teacher of hers. Maybe the idea of her former art teacher married to her brother, even in the form of avatars, was too squicky for her?

8:58 AM  
Blogger howard said...

qnjones,

Interesting that there are no new run strips between the Phil/Connie one night stand and Phil's departure. Not only could Lynn have fleshed out their relationship a little, but she could have made Phil and Connie look better.

As I look at the original run, it was very Elly-centric, which is to say that almost everything is from Elly’s perspective. Elly only sees Phil coming and going with Connie, and so that is all we see. The only thing the new-runs have added to this storyline is we have seen more of Elly talking to Annie about Connie and Phil; but that is still from Elly’s limited knowledge. Phil’s visit obviously had a dramatic effect on young Michael, judging from his weeping today; and we know that he will have had such a dramatic effect on Connie that she makes her trip to Montreal. The new-runs could have been used to flesh all that out, if Lynn Johnston was only willing to show things from someone else’s perspective than Elly’s.

Random thought: Why didn't Lynn ultimately marry Phil to Connie?

Phil is based on Lynn Johnston’s real-life brother, Alan. I always thought Connie is a character ripping off Andrea from the Cathy comic strip, Cathy's ultra-feminist best friend; although aprilp_katje has a stern art teacher reference. I can only guess that Lynn Johnston initially had problems marrying off her real-life brother in her comic strip, even though she eventually got over that.

I also have to wonder what her motivations were for kicking Phil and Connie out.

Although aprilp_katje says that Alan Ridgway did not like the way he was treated in For Better or For Worse (and I don't blame him), his disappearance matched that of his real-life activities. This is from his bio on

www.alridgway.com

Alan came to southern Ontario to continue his studies with Ron Romm of the Canadian Brass and spent ten years teaching and freelancing in Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and St. Catherines including seven seasons with the theatre orchestra at the Stratford Festival. Cutbacks at the theatre in the early 1980's and in the industry in general, convinced Alan to move over to teaching full-time. In 1983 he went back to U.B.C. to do a year in education, a path which eventually brought him to Ottawa. He has taught music at Canterbury High School since 1989.

In 1983 he moved to British Columbia and from there he went to Ottawa. It appears that once he was out of Ontario, he was kicked out of the strip.

9:11 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Correction. Phil was kicked out of the strip more around the time he started teaching high school in Ottawa in 1989.

9:37 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

There you go with your mad research skills, howtheduck! I followed the link and couldn't help noticing how evident the family resemblance is between LJ and AR. And I can definitely see his resemblance to his avatar.

10:22 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

Well, it certainly makes sense that when Alan left to pursue his own interests, Phil vanished. Without a reference to guide her, Lynn couldn't have imagined what Phil might get up to so he too had to go.

11:22 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home