Two Repeated Reprints in a Row!
Goodness. This is two in a row. Today’s reprint of For Better or For Worse was reprinted on 6/26/2008. As it turns out, I was at Boy Scout camp with my son during that week, so I did not comment on this strip the first time around. I guess the second time is the charm.
Elly says that she made a threat to Michael that she wished she hadn’t made. She laments that “they”, which I presume is really just Michael, since I hope Lizzie is not old enough to be threatened by Elly for misbehaviour, made her act on her threat. Of course, Elly could be including John in her "they"statement.
Elly regrets having made the threat to Michael of sending him to his room for the rest of the day with no supper. Which part does she regret? We don’t see Michael weeping or forlorn in his bedroom. We don’t see Michael suffering from hunger. I think the problem is that when Michael doesn’t eat his supper, then Elly must finish his supper for him, just as she does the leftovers. Elly’s regret for punishing Michael is probably her own suffering from overeating.
Another interesting thing I notice is that in Panel 3, when Elly is moving Michael to his bedroom, she has chosen to move Michael by grabbing his clothes (shirt collar, back of his pants) instead of grabbing Michael. Naturally this is because:
a. Michael’s skin is too slippery to grasp.
b. She wants to expose Michael’s belly button to the public, so that they will know that he is not a clone.
c. It isn’t enough to send Michael to his room without supper, but there must be a little strangulation and wedgie action to make the punishment complete.
d. Lynn just finished watching the Silly Walk sketch of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and decided to take this opportunity to show young Michael how to do it.
e. Elly is not sure if the boy she caught is Michael, so she must verify that his name is written on the tags of the clothes he is wearing.
As for the habit of reprinting previously reprinted strips, I suspect that Lynn Johnston is unaware that they were reprinted before. Her method of choosing which strips to reprint seems haphazard at best. When she was doing the hybrid, which is where this strip was originally reprinted, she was in the habit of gathering reprint strips based on a theme. I imagine Lynn decided to gather a set of "Misbehaving Michael" strips, and then picked them based on that criterion and only that criterion.
Elly says that she made a threat to Michael that she wished she hadn’t made. She laments that “they”, which I presume is really just Michael, since I hope Lizzie is not old enough to be threatened by Elly for misbehaviour, made her act on her threat. Of course, Elly could be including John in her "they"statement.
Elly regrets having made the threat to Michael of sending him to his room for the rest of the day with no supper. Which part does she regret? We don’t see Michael weeping or forlorn in his bedroom. We don’t see Michael suffering from hunger. I think the problem is that when Michael doesn’t eat his supper, then Elly must finish his supper for him, just as she does the leftovers. Elly’s regret for punishing Michael is probably her own suffering from overeating.
Another interesting thing I notice is that in Panel 3, when Elly is moving Michael to his bedroom, she has chosen to move Michael by grabbing his clothes (shirt collar, back of his pants) instead of grabbing Michael. Naturally this is because:
a. Michael’s skin is too slippery to grasp.
b. She wants to expose Michael’s belly button to the public, so that they will know that he is not a clone.
c. It isn’t enough to send Michael to his room without supper, but there must be a little strangulation and wedgie action to make the punishment complete.
d. Lynn just finished watching the Silly Walk sketch of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and decided to take this opportunity to show young Michael how to do it.
e. Elly is not sure if the boy she caught is Michael, so she must verify that his name is written on the tags of the clothes he is wearing.
As for the habit of reprinting previously reprinted strips, I suspect that Lynn Johnston is unaware that they were reprinted before. Her method of choosing which strips to reprint seems haphazard at best. When she was doing the hybrid, which is where this strip was originally reprinted, she was in the habit of gathering reprint strips based on a theme. I imagine Lynn decided to gather a set of "Misbehaving Michael" strips, and then picked them based on that criterion and only that criterion.
posted by howard at 11:25 PM
2 Comments:
As for the habit of reprinting previously reprinted strips, I suspect that Lynn Johnston is unaware that they were reprinted before.
That means that she isn't really going to understand the uproar about her repeating herself; she isn't very organized and seems to hate being told to get her act together by random blggers.
Random blggers or anyone. I can't blame her. Her objective is to make as much money with the least amount of work as possible. As far as I can tell, she is meeting that objective. As long as she stays in the 1st 2 years of the strip, she can make that claim about how no one saw this work when it was originally published, so repeating it is like new material. When she gets into year 3, this becomes less of the case.
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