Elly Patterson: Wilderness Maid
Today’s For Better or For Worse reprint is a mixed bag. The message is obvious that even out in the wilderness John makes Elly do all the work, all the while making comments about how wonderful it is to get away from it all. This is our 3rd day in a row of John being an oblivious slug. It seems obvious now that this is not a camping trip but a carping trip.
In the meantime, surrounding these comments by John are some odd images:
Panel 1: Elly is supposedly making bacon and eggs, and is managing to do so without any indication of the food preparation. There are no eggshells. There is no bacon package. There is no cooler holding the food. In order for this to happen, Elly would have had to have disposed of all of it before cooking the bacon and eggs.
Panel 2: John is talking about a crackling fire and a cool breeze all in the same breath. However we see neither breeze nor fire. Instead we see Elly doing dishes without indication of the preparation. There is no soap. According to Monday’s strip, there should be no running water, which means that the Pattersons have to have brought water to wash dishes. There should be a container of water somewhere.
Panel 3: Elly is sweeping out the tent. That means she brought a broom to a campout in order to sweep out what appears to be an enormous walk-in tent. That thing has got to be over 2 metres tall. The ones I have seen that tall hold 8 - 10 people. That's a little overkill for 2 adults and 2 kids. Personally, I prefer to shake the dirt out of my tent when I am taking it down. That’s a lot easier. I don’t take brooms on camping trips.
Why do I have the feeling that Lynn Johnston did this strip without ever having gone camping?
In the meantime, surrounding these comments by John are some odd images:
Panel 1: Elly is supposedly making bacon and eggs, and is managing to do so without any indication of the food preparation. There are no eggshells. There is no bacon package. There is no cooler holding the food. In order for this to happen, Elly would have had to have disposed of all of it before cooking the bacon and eggs.
Panel 2: John is talking about a crackling fire and a cool breeze all in the same breath. However we see neither breeze nor fire. Instead we see Elly doing dishes without indication of the preparation. There is no soap. According to Monday’s strip, there should be no running water, which means that the Pattersons have to have brought water to wash dishes. There should be a container of water somewhere.
Panel 3: Elly is sweeping out the tent. That means she brought a broom to a campout in order to sweep out what appears to be an enormous walk-in tent. That thing has got to be over 2 metres tall. The ones I have seen that tall hold 8 - 10 people. That's a little overkill for 2 adults and 2 kids. Personally, I prefer to shake the dirt out of my tent when I am taking it down. That’s a lot easier. I don’t take brooms on camping trips.
Why do I have the feeling that Lynn Johnston did this strip without ever having gone camping?
posted by howard at 9:26 PM
14 Comments:
And I bet if Lynn were asked about camping, her response would be that she has gone camping tons of times.
Then we could have a story about a friend that got killed by a bear while camping, so Lynn stopped.
howard,
Why do I have the feeling that Lynn Johnston did this strip without ever having gone camping?
The closest she seems to have come is checking out the action at an RV camp. What Elly is doing makes sense if you assume they're sleeping in an Airstream trailer.
That thing has got to be over 2 metres tall. The ones I have seen that tall hold 8 - 10 people. That's a little overkill for 2 adults and 2 kids.
And a dog! Don't forget Farley just because the Pattersons did! He's there: he's just lost in the depths of the tent.
Then we could have a story about a friend that got killed by a bear while camping, so Lynn stopped.
Complete with Lynnisms about how this was a great friend of hers, whose name will be one thing at the start of the story and another by the final paragraph.
debjyn,
Then we could have a story about a friend that got killed by a bear while camping, so Lynn stopped.
And this was the reason why Lynn did the bear poop jokes in her Mtigwaki strips, in honour of that friend.
DreadedCandiru2
What Elly is doing makes sense if you assume they're sleeping in an Airstream trailer.
She does seem to equate home life and camp life, as least far as cleaning and John being a jerk goes.
forworse,
And a dog! Don't forget Farley just because the Pattersons did! He's there: he's just lost in the depths of the tent.
There you go! That is reading between the lines, just like Lynn wants her readers to do. Farley is there along with Annie and her child, and Connie and her child and Mrs. Baird. There’s room for all in the Patterson tent.
Lynn states that Farley isn't with them:
Nope. The Patterson station wagon doesn't have a trunk! Farley is having his own holiday at a well-respected local kennel while his family is away.
Seems odd to not take your dog camping, especially since Farley obviously went camping later in the strip.
Elly? Bring a cooler?!? She's much too manic to do something like that. She killed a wild Canadian-type pig with her bare hands while everyone else was asleep last night, butchered it, drained it, cured it, then chopped it up!
Then she climbed up every tree in a 25 mile radius until she'd found a female bird, screamed at them to produce NOW, and gathered up a harvest of fear-induced eggs.
She cracked them onto her forehead, picked out the shells from her stoneware bowl, then made Marian's Secret Recipe Wild Bird Egg Scramble! Scrumptious.
The cleaning pan full of dishes needs no water and soap, of course. Elly just uses her own spit! And believe you me, she can hock with the best of them!
bobbeers,
Nope. The Patterson station wagon doesn't have a trunk! Farley is having his own holiday at a well-respected local kennel while his family is away.
I am certainly glad to know that Farley was not at a disrespected, foreign kennel.
Seems odd to not take your dog camping, especially since Farley obviously went camping later in the strip.
The real reason is because these strips are reprinted from the first year. The Pattersons got Farley in their second year.
Anonymous,
Your suggestions to explain Elly’s actions bring a smile to my face. It reminds me of an old Victoria Jackson sketch on Saturday Night Live, where she and her boyfriend are stranded on a desert island, and she manages to make him a watch for a present.
When I was a child my mom would bring a little hand broom along. We would camp by lakes and change our clothes in the tent so it was sensible to sweep so that we didn't sleep on a pile of sand or have to dust everything that had been in the tent off when we got home. However a huge broom after sleeping in what should have been a fairly clean tent is off. The problem I have with Lynn isn't that she is always wrong its that most times she is only half right. Making what she has Elly do stupid and pointless even if in real life there might be a point.
yorba,
The problem I have with Lynn isn't that she is always wrong its that most times she is only half right.
Exactly. It's like having Elly cook, but not showing eggshells. Sometimes the jokes are perilously close to being funny, but then there is that little something which takes away from it.
Well, at the campsites my family visited when I was younger, there was usually at least one station where water could be found. Often, there'd be multiple such stations posted throughout the grounds.
Nothing fancy, obviously - just a stake in the ground, with a garden hose and a faucet fastened to it. But it served for getting water to do dishes or some basic washing up with.
Odds are, even the disreputable, unlivable cabin would have a tap somewhere that worked.
Not that Lynn would think of this, of course. If she thought about it at all, she probably just assumed that we'd pick up on the fact that of course Elly went down and dipped out the water from the lake! Lookit how put-upon she is! Lookit!
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