The Return (or First Appearance) of the Crawl Space
Back in February, 2008; Deanna Patterson found the crawl space of the old Patterson house she and Mike bought from Elly and John. In that crawl space, behind a rock (I don’t know why there was a rock there), she found Grandma Marian’s old wedding dress, which ended up being Elizabeth’s wedding dress for her wedding to Anthony Caine.
In today’s new-run of For Better or For Worse, we see the crawl space again. Young Michael has apparently ditched his sister and tried looking for presents in the crawl space. I don’t remember ever seeing this crawl space before it appeared in February 2008. Using AMU reprints and the FBorFW Comic Strip Catalog, there was no appearance of a crawl space listed. It seems like Lynn Johnston created the crawl space in order to introduce Elizabeth’s dress, and here we are seeing that crawl space has always existed in the house.
The big complaint about Grandma Marian’s dress was that it was supposed have been the dress she wore when got married just after World War II, but its style was more like a wedding dress from the 1980s. It would be a dream come true if this sequence of strips was somehow going to explain how a 1980s wedding dress ended up in the crawl space behind a rock and someone would think it was Grandma Marian’s old dress.
Maybe it will be like this:
Elly: My friend from Creative Writing got divorced this week.
John: You have a friend aside from Connie and Annie?
Elly: John, be serious. You remember my friend, Marian.
John: Oh right. Same name as your mother. I thought she just got married.
Elly: She did. Now she hates him. Turns out he was cheating on her with the woman who manages her office.
John: Poor girl. Can you imagine a guy who would do something like that?
Elly: For some reason I can. Anyway, she’s giving away her old wedding dress.
John: And you decided to take it.
Elly: You never can tell when you might need a wedding dress. Lizzie will get married some day, and this could be her dress. She will save a fortune.
John: You and your penny pinching. You are not going to put that dress in my workshop.
Elly: I’ll put it in the crawl space in one of those dress-preserving containers and put Marian’s name on it, so you won’t think it was mine.
John: The crawl space? That’s where I keep my pet rock collection.
Elly: There’s enough space for a wedding dress behind the rock.
John: OK. Just don’t forget you put it there. I don’t want you to forget it, if we ever move out of this house.
Elly: That’s not likely. The only person I would ever sell this house to is Michael, AFTER he’s married to a woman with a lisp and bowl haircut, has at least 2 children, and has become a best-selling author.
John: I guess that means we are never selling this house.
Elly: We’ll see.
In today’s new-run of For Better or For Worse, we see the crawl space again. Young Michael has apparently ditched his sister and tried looking for presents in the crawl space. I don’t remember ever seeing this crawl space before it appeared in February 2008. Using AMU reprints and the FBorFW Comic Strip Catalog, there was no appearance of a crawl space listed. It seems like Lynn Johnston created the crawl space in order to introduce Elizabeth’s dress, and here we are seeing that crawl space has always existed in the house.
The big complaint about Grandma Marian’s dress was that it was supposed have been the dress she wore when got married just after World War II, but its style was more like a wedding dress from the 1980s. It would be a dream come true if this sequence of strips was somehow going to explain how a 1980s wedding dress ended up in the crawl space behind a rock and someone would think it was Grandma Marian’s old dress.
Maybe it will be like this:
Elly: My friend from Creative Writing got divorced this week.
John: You have a friend aside from Connie and Annie?
Elly: John, be serious. You remember my friend, Marian.
John: Oh right. Same name as your mother. I thought she just got married.
Elly: She did. Now she hates him. Turns out he was cheating on her with the woman who manages her office.
John: Poor girl. Can you imagine a guy who would do something like that?
Elly: For some reason I can. Anyway, she’s giving away her old wedding dress.
John: And you decided to take it.
Elly: You never can tell when you might need a wedding dress. Lizzie will get married some day, and this could be her dress. She will save a fortune.
John: You and your penny pinching. You are not going to put that dress in my workshop.
Elly: I’ll put it in the crawl space in one of those dress-preserving containers and put Marian’s name on it, so you won’t think it was mine.
John: The crawl space? That’s where I keep my pet rock collection.
Elly: There’s enough space for a wedding dress behind the rock.
John: OK. Just don’t forget you put it there. I don’t want you to forget it, if we ever move out of this house.
Elly: That’s not likely. The only person I would ever sell this house to is Michael, AFTER he’s married to a woman with a lisp and bowl haircut, has at least 2 children, and has become a best-selling author.
John: I guess that means we are never selling this house.
Elly: We’ll see.
posted by howard at 10:16 PM
12 Comments:
Nothing else came up on the catalogue for me either, but I thought there were a few other mentions of the crawl space, so double-checked the collection recaps I did a while ago.
The Last Straw: Elly clears out the crawl space for a yard sale fundraiser for the library. They begin to run out of items an hour before the end of the sale, so Elly races back into the house and grabs anything else worth selling. Therefore the crawl space was emptied in 1983-4 (this book was published in 1985).
Keep The Home Fries Burning (published 1986): The crawl space presumably gets refilled as Connie dumps all her unwanted junk on the Pattersons as she prepares to move to Thunder Bay. They inherit snowshoes, books, a punch bowl, miscellaneous boxes and odds and ends. Was Marian's dress really what Connie wore when she married Pete?
"That's Not How They do It On TV!" (strips from 1993-4, published inside the 15th anniversary collection). In April 1994 the sump pump in the crawl space stops working and the basement floods. They need all their weeping tiles and drywall replaced. They lost some books, the couch, carpet and most of the Christmas decorations, as well as the clinic records he kept in the crawl space. Note that the crawl space was in the basement in this series of strips.
Sunshine & Shadow (strips from 1997-8): the crawl space is cleaned and out comes outdoor Christmas lights, a 5,000 piece gigantic puzzle and clinic files from 1995-6, unsorted photographs and slides (boxes labelled old house and baby, 1972-?, holiday ’85, farm trip 1989, renovation pictures, duplicates, university stuff, 1981, 1986, 1990, some puppy pictures, dental lectures & family, unknown people, odd projector attachments.
So the crawl space was emptied for the yard sale, refilled by Connie, emptied after the flood, and then tidied again just a couple of years later, yet the Miracle Dress (which I now believe must have been Connie's) survived, all because it was hidden behind a rock which no one mentioned until 2008. Had it not been for the plumber mentioning weeping tiles and drywall in relation to the crawl space, I would have assumed that the crawl space was just an empty place under the foundation, built to accommodate a rock which couldn't be blasted out of the way when the house was built.
That’s not likely. The only person I would ever sell this house to is Michael, AFTER he’s married to a woman with a lisp and bowl haircut, has at least 2 children, and has become a best-selling author.
::snerk::
My favorite lines. :)
forworse, The Last Straw also has the arc where Elly is babysitting the Nichols kids and gets John to try breaking into the Nichols house to get Richard's potty (he won't use any other). In that arc, I think Michael retrieves a potty from the crawl space. Through the foobsearch, I can only find a few strips from the breaking-in part of the arc, and I can't check that collection right now.
So what we're left with is a crawl space that extends into what they call hammerspace; this means that they can pull anything they want out of it when they need it.
I found the strip where Michael says he's pulled a potty from the crawl space.
Connie's wedding dress would make the most sense for the time period. Of course Connie was very skinny when she got married, so it would be questionable as to whether or not the more hefty Elizabeth could fit into her dress. Actually the same could be said about Marian who, in the early strips, was also very thin and tall. Of course we never saw Connie in the presence of the wedding dress, so there would be no chance of her saying, "Hey! That's my old wedding dress!"
And once the aspiring seamstress Deana cut up the miracle dress, then Connie wouldn't have recognized it at the wedding.
Just think, after all this time we have solved the answer to the miracle dress origins!
More aimless Xmas meandering. Again, having a first grader myself means that I have an alternate take on these. Mine has no concept that mommy and daddy might have secreted his presents around the house, even though he came across some wrapped presents last year. Kid minds - most of them - just aren't that linear. I find it hard to believe that Lynn's kids were that deductive that they reasoned out mom's secret, let alone scoured the house looking for loot.
And what idiot mom "hides" stuff in places that a) is low enough for the kids to get into and b) doesn't have some sort of lock on it? Oh, right, sorry...this is Elly we're talking about.
The truly sad part is that this could have been funny if Lynn had made a simple change in panel 4: show the kid realizing that he's busted and frantically trying to repair the wrapping. Don't give us the idiotic sound effects (when was the last time you taped something and it made the sound "tape!"?) - show the kid's hands flurrying about while he looks guilty. Guilty is sort like gobsmacked, Lynn, think of it that way.
THEN you have a sort-of funny (if you ignore the essential moron-grade level of the whole arc)
Oh, and one other thing that bugged me.
What the hell is this space?
Typically a "crawl space" is what you have under a house with no basement that's not slab-on-grade; there's an air space under wood floor that's typically too low to stand up in (hence the term). These crawlspaces are accessed through a trap in the floor or a door in the exterior stem wall, not a door in an interior wall. The only exception is a house with a daylight basement built into a slope, and the views of the exterior we have from elsewhen in the strip suggest that the lot is flat.
But we have loads of strips showing the Patterson house with a basement. In my experience houses with a full basement rarely have "crawlspaces".
FDChief, I'm also the parent of a first-grader, and I concur about how the mind of a child that age works. It hasn't occurred to him to search for presents. Not only that, but we received a package yesterday from relatives--and even though he asked my husband what the package contained, and even though my husband told him that it's got holiday gifts from rellies, that package has not been tampered with.
And ITA about the idiocy of hiding the gifts at kid level.
April
So Richard and Lawrence have the same affliction where they can't use any potty or toilet but their own? Or did Lynn have some vague memory that there was a particular character with this condition and mistakenly thought it was Lawrence in the newruins? Could it be that the one example we have had of an expanded storyline is just a case of mistaken identity? Lynn has messed up Richard's age and birth already: this could just be more of the same and she simply turned him into Lawrence for the purposes of these strips.
Could it be that the one example we have had of an expanded storyline is just a case of mistaken identity? Lynn has messed up Richard's age and birth already: this could just be more of the same and she simply turned him into Lawrence for the purposes of these strips.
Hm. I hadn't thought of that, forworse. But now that you mention it, it does seem plausible that Lynn had a vague recollection of having given one of the children an aversion to toileting away from home and decided to assign that trait to Lawrence.
[verification word: lyinge]
This certainly would not be the first case of strip storyline reuse in the new-runs. Yesterday I found the virtual duplicate of the Farley - Easter Egg eating strip.
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