The Identification of Miss Moreau
This is a pretty good description of anterior hypoplasia. Basically, this is if you get hit in the mouth when you are a kid, and the baby tooth whacks the permanent tooth developing underneath and knock offs some enamel on the permanent tooth.
Here is a description of crossbite. Basically this is when when your upper teeth fall inside your lower teeth on one side when you bite down. Aside from dental accuracy, today’s reprint of For Better or For Worse travels into the world of “What is the character of this character, really?”
Jean Baker
On the one hand, Jean Baker supports Elly and warns John not to fool around her while she is gone on a trip. Jean even knows Elly well enough to tell John that Elly will expect to start looking for a job. And yet, in today’s strip, Jean is practically whispering to Dr. John Patterson that a hot patient has arrived in the office and describes her in terms which would imply that she expects John to enjoy looking at the patient’s body. It’s hard to believe this is the same woman.
John Patterson
John Patterson is the man, who runs around after the pretty girls on the beach right in front of his wife and daughter. John Patterson hires a hygienist who looks like Shania Twain.
However, John Patterson is from time-to-time, completely oblivious how a woman looks, only pays attention to how her teeth look. This isn’t the first time we have seen a strip like that, and today’s strip falls into that category. You can’t really have it both ways. Either John is a lecher, or John is obsessed with teeth to the point where he ignores women. I suppose it depends on how Lynn Johnston feels that day about John.
Here is a description of crossbite. Basically this is when when your upper teeth fall inside your lower teeth on one side when you bite down. Aside from dental accuracy, today’s reprint of For Better or For Worse travels into the world of “What is the character of this character, really?”
Jean Baker
On the one hand, Jean Baker supports Elly and warns John not to fool around her while she is gone on a trip. Jean even knows Elly well enough to tell John that Elly will expect to start looking for a job. And yet, in today’s strip, Jean is practically whispering to Dr. John Patterson that a hot patient has arrived in the office and describes her in terms which would imply that she expects John to enjoy looking at the patient’s body. It’s hard to believe this is the same woman.
John Patterson
John Patterson is the man, who runs around after the pretty girls on the beach right in front of his wife and daughter. John Patterson hires a hygienist who looks like Shania Twain.
However, John Patterson is from time-to-time, completely oblivious how a woman looks, only pays attention to how her teeth look. This isn’t the first time we have seen a strip like that, and today’s strip falls into that category. You can’t really have it both ways. Either John is a lecher, or John is obsessed with teeth to the point where he ignores women. I suppose it depends on how Lynn Johnston feels that day about John.
posted by howard at 10:35 PM
11 Comments:
A similar strip from One-More-Washload (p. 23) shows John and Elly at a party. John is engaged in conversation with a beautiful woman wearing a very low-cut dress. Elly spies this and comes over to stand next to John possessively and the woman leaves. John comments to Elly that the woman had great teeth and Elly just has a slight smirk on her face. It's a very early strip and the artwork Elly hasn't yet settled into the character we now recognize, not least of which because she isn't screaming in the final panel. John looks much like John, though. The silhouettes of party guests are shaded with a series of thin diagonal lines and it's quite effective.
So from this strip and today's, we can see that John really doesn't pay that much attention to women's bodies.
Compare that to p. 20 of One-More-Washload where Elly is looking out the window at Mike and Lawrence pretending to be spacemen and commenting to John that sometimes she thinks she's forgotten how to fantasize. John doesn't reply: he's busy leering at Macho Man magazine. Then there's also p. 27 of the same collection, where John is being uncharacteristically affectionate, nibbling Elly's neck as she does the dishes, and, in a rather creepy drawing, appears to be ogling Lizzie over Elly's shoulder as Elly changes her nappy, although I'm sure the drawing is meant to be John giving Elly a shoulder rub. In the final panel, Elly pats John on the cheek and says, "You've been into 'those magazines' again, haven't you, John?" Again, not quite the Elly we know, to judge from her tolerant attitude.
Put together -- and these strips do appear in very close proximity -- we see that, unless he's at the beach, John is interested in the models in the magazines, but in real life he notices only dental work.
This tendency of John's changes in later years, as there's a strip where John and Elly stop at a gas station / convenience store and she finds him looking at the lads' magazines. He starts pointing out all the dental problems the models have. After they leave, the shopkeeper goes over to the magazine rack and comments that, in all the years he has sold those magazines, he'd never noticed teeth before.
Sorry I can't link to any of these as they've yet to be repeated, but since they make John look like a boor, I'm sure we'll see them soon enough.
forworse,
I just hope that Lynn doesn't try to create new-ruins based on those strips that seek to amplify John's boorishness; given her inability to decipher how people behave, it's likely that if she does, John's behavior will look more justifiable given that Elly will be a screaming harpy in each and every one of them.
howard,
It seems to me that it doesn't really matter if John is a leering perv or a space case; the priority is to make Rod look bad.
Whatever her reason for drawing these strips, the result is to make me think Lynn Johnston is seriously preoccupied with other women's bodies.
A similar strip from One-More-Washload (p. 23) shows John and Elly at a party.
This strip used to be included in the "time travel" feature on the foob site--since taken down when the hybrid/new-run phases were making it redundant. The first time I saw this strip, I didn't recognize Elly at all and just wondered who she was.
Gah. Thanks a lot for linking to that latter-day flashback to how John and Elly met. I had completely forgotten about the Lips of Loveliness phenomenon, and now it's back lodged in my brain like some kind of barbed venomous stinger.
On the other hand, at least the new-runs seem to have dropped that meme. At last, something good about them.
dlauthor, what I find most disturbing about that fakey-flashback strip is that the putative Young!Elly appears to be wearing some kind of Elly Patterson Halloween mask instead of having a real, human face. ::shudder::
It seems characters in the FBoFW will have whatever personality Lynn wants them to have on a given day in order to "sell the joke". That's all.
Hmm..Maybe it's Rod that was obsessed with teeth and didn't really notice women's bodies unless he wanted a fantasy, and that it was Lynn who ogled all these women because she's obsessed with her body and measured herself against other women all the time?
Anonymous,
It seems characters in the FBoFW will have whatever personality Lynn wants them to have on a given day in order to "sell the joke".
That's certainly true. I used to comment on the modern strip to point out that Meredith used to get all the "kids say the darnedest things" moments, while Robin got all the "barely speaking Robin makes a mess" moments. Then when the grandkids were together, they would act in completely different ways.
Destroyer of Worlds,
...it was Lynn who ogled all these women because she's obsessed with her body and measured herself against other women all the time?
Considering Lynn's interview statements that Rod Johnston used to work in his office entirely populated by beautiful women, I think you may be onto something. It is only when I saw a picture of a woman who used to work for Rod as a dental hygienist before she worked for Lynn as her Executive Director did I realize that Lynn was exaggerating. The woman was younger than Lynn and reasonably attractive, but not a knock-out beauty.
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