Saturday, February 14, 2009

Valentine's Day is for the Dogs

The joke of today's For Better or For Worse new-run is: If your hands and face are sticky, dog fur will stick to them.

The reason this is funny is because: Most people know that dog fur sticks to sticky things, so there is no surprise element to the humour. The joke depends mostly on the sight gag of Lizzie with dog fur on her face and hands. I think Lynn Johnston realizes the joke is weak, because she gives Lizzie a much heavier layer of fur than would occur in real life, and puts Elly in the background for reaction to it, just in case you miss the idea that this is supposed to be an unexpected situation.

Additional objectives:

1. Include Farley the dog, because those plush toys are going to be finished and for sale sometime in the near future.
2. Include Valentine’s Day to keep that real-time aging thing going with the story.
3. Under no circumstances show John and Elly’s lips touching in a kiss.

To set up the joke, you need one panel showing Lizzie with a sticky face and hands; one panel with Lizzie hugging and kissing on Farley; one panel with Lizzie covered in fur. Unfortunately Lynn uses a lot more panels than that because, as usual, she doesn’t have enough story to get to this joke. Sunday strips are often a problem for Lynn Johnston for this reason. It’s rare when she fully uses all the panels available to her on Sundays.

As for the kiss between John and Elly, Lynn Johnston uses a silhouette to obscure the details and then draws Elly as if she were a short man with a crew cut, just so there is no doubt. You can compare Elly’s picture in the prior panel to Elly in silhouette to see what I am talking about. Elly in silhouette has no bangs, no poof to her hairline, a different nose shape, and a different jaw line in contrast to Elly in the prior panel. Silhouette Elly doesn’t look anything like Elly, which is probably what Lynn Johnston was after.

For Valentine’s Day, we have a backstory of how Lizzie got a sucker to make her hands sticky that involves buying flowers and suckers from a florist to give to Elly. I know that in some families there is a tradition of the woman giving something to the man, but scanning through the old Valentine’s Day strips, thanks to AMU reprints that is never the case with Elly. If she ever gave John something on Valentine’s Day, it was before 1996. Going back through those, the best Valentine’s Day strip in the last 12 years in my opinion is this one from 2004. Admittedly, it is not very romantic, but at least it tells a story using all the panels of a Sunday strip and sets Elly on fire. The saddest Valentine's Day strip was the one from 2000, which was a Peanuts tribute strip addressing Sparky and Jeanne Schulz. Sadly, Charles Schulz died on February 12, 2000, and probably never saw it.

5 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

howard,

To set up the joke, you need one panel showing Lizzie with a sticky face and hands; one panel with Lizzie hugging and kissing on Farley; one panel with Lizzie covered in fur. Unfortunately Lynn uses a lot more panels than that because, as usual, she doesn’t have enough story to get to this joke. Sunday strips are often a problem for Lynn Johnston for this reason. It’s rare when she fully uses all the panels available to her on Sunday

I know. Most of the time, we get would could be a nice weekly strip weighed dowm by too much backstory. Funny; either she doesn't give us enough of an explanation or she gives us too much.

2:41 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

That's "what could", not "would could":(

2:42 AM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

Funny; either she doesn't give us enough of an explanation or she gives us too much.

I often think that these wordless strips are in response to the "Show and not Tell" accusations of most of her daily strips, or a day her Spanish translator Liuba Liamzini can take off from doing En Lo Bueno y En Lo Malo.

6:42 AM  
Blogger John F Jamele said...

The 2004 Valentine's Day strip shows Elly's hair catching on fire, John taking the opportunity to perform an act of violence against his wife (I wonder how many times he'd fantasized about drowning her before this,) John laughing hysterically at his wife's hair loss and possible burn, and then wondering why she's mad.

Mr. Lockhorn has more respect for his wife than this jerk does.

3:49 PM  
Blogger howard said...

In the 2004 Valentine's Day strip, John is a jerk; but at least Lynn is telling a story that actually fills the entire Sunday strip space. I will take that over all these space filler panels every Sunday.

7:54 PM  

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