Abandon hope all ye who enter here
The supposed inscription at the entrance to Hell, from Dante's Divine Comedy. Or rather the translation into English by H.F.Cary.
As far as Hell goes, it appears that to Lynn Johnston, it is somehow related to plumbing. We see stairs leading to toilet-looking bathtub. I think it is a bathtub, since there is a towel over the side and a toy sailboat. However there is also toilet paper coming down the stairs. The water flowing down the stairs could belong to either a toilet or a bathtub.
Given that there are dirty handprints on the walls, I could expect this is the reason for the bath. Elly has a dripping plunger in her hand and water dripping from her other hand, which doesn’t tell me which one.
There are some clues from history:
7/7/2000 - Grandpa Jim lost his teeth in a toilet, and they had to call a plumber.
1/6/2000 - Liz lost Deanna’s engagement ring down the sink
12/2/2006 – Mike calls a plumber in to find the Ned doll Meredith had dropped in the toilet years before, after Robin put Michael’s socks down the toilet.
4/09/2009 – Mike tells Elly about how Lizzie flushed John’s socks down the toilet
Lynn has a theme with kids putting items into the plumbing or losing precious items. We see little Lizzie screaming Peanuts style waving a baby doll with no head on it. My money is that the baby doll head is down in the plumbing.
As for the rest of the house, there is a remarkable similarity to the 4/20/2009 strip. We have the same foot-less picture of Mom and a smudge from some kind of 5-toed animal print next to a door. The difference now is that someone has added a picture beside the animal print, and someone has put a rocket-shaped dart into the picture. My kids never got to play with sharp-pointed darts at that age. We also see a lampshade and a picture off balance.
It would be nice to say all this stuff happened in a short period of time, but the strips reprinted recently with Elly ignoring her children for her soap opera and Elly leaving Lizzie alone in the bathtub and Elly unable to motivate herself to clean without someone critical coming over, leads me to believe that a lot of this stuff has been accumulating over time. Probably the only recent event was the plumbing issue.
In 1980, Lynn regularly portrayed Elly as a poor housekeeper and a poor parent. This strip hits all those marks. The funny part about the new-runs is that they often try to maintain the image of Elly, super cleaner, which was the perspective of modern Elly, into the the 1980s Elly. With the strip today, the two images do not fit.
Given that, Elly’s warning to John seems very appropriate. If John lived in a house with a woman who was alternatively hyper-clean and a slob, it could seem like a Hell of sorts.
As far as Hell goes, it appears that to Lynn Johnston, it is somehow related to plumbing. We see stairs leading to toilet-looking bathtub. I think it is a bathtub, since there is a towel over the side and a toy sailboat. However there is also toilet paper coming down the stairs. The water flowing down the stairs could belong to either a toilet or a bathtub.
Given that there are dirty handprints on the walls, I could expect this is the reason for the bath. Elly has a dripping plunger in her hand and water dripping from her other hand, which doesn’t tell me which one.
There are some clues from history:
7/7/2000 - Grandpa Jim lost his teeth in a toilet, and they had to call a plumber.
1/6/2000 - Liz lost Deanna’s engagement ring down the sink
12/2/2006 – Mike calls a plumber in to find the Ned doll Meredith had dropped in the toilet years before, after Robin put Michael’s socks down the toilet.
4/09/2009 – Mike tells Elly about how Lizzie flushed John’s socks down the toilet
Lynn has a theme with kids putting items into the plumbing or losing precious items. We see little Lizzie screaming Peanuts style waving a baby doll with no head on it. My money is that the baby doll head is down in the plumbing.
As for the rest of the house, there is a remarkable similarity to the 4/20/2009 strip. We have the same foot-less picture of Mom and a smudge from some kind of 5-toed animal print next to a door. The difference now is that someone has added a picture beside the animal print, and someone has put a rocket-shaped dart into the picture. My kids never got to play with sharp-pointed darts at that age. We also see a lampshade and a picture off balance.
It would be nice to say all this stuff happened in a short period of time, but the strips reprinted recently with Elly ignoring her children for her soap opera and Elly leaving Lizzie alone in the bathtub and Elly unable to motivate herself to clean without someone critical coming over, leads me to believe that a lot of this stuff has been accumulating over time. Probably the only recent event was the plumbing issue.
In 1980, Lynn regularly portrayed Elly as a poor housekeeper and a poor parent. This strip hits all those marks. The funny part about the new-runs is that they often try to maintain the image of Elly, super cleaner, which was the perspective of modern Elly, into the the 1980s Elly. With the strip today, the two images do not fit.
Given that, Elly’s warning to John seems very appropriate. If John lived in a house with a woman who was alternatively hyper-clean and a slob, it could seem like a Hell of sorts.
posted by howard at 6:55 AM
2 Comments:
Given that, Elly’s warning to John seems very appropriate. If John lived in a house with a woman who was alternatively hyper-clean and a slob, it could seem like a Hell of sorts
That it would; too bad for John that it's a Hell he can't or won't escape; he's too old-fashioned to divorce Elly simply because she's insane. She'd have to cheat on him so that he could explain it without getting stared at.
In John's world, most of the women are like that. If you consider Connie or Anne as alternatives, Elly doesn't look too bad. Of course, this is because all the women in For Better or Worse are Lynn Johnston.
Post a Comment
<< Home