Saw It / Redraw It
Today’s new-run of For Better or For Worse falls into a category I would call, “Redrawn strip with a different punch line”. For an example of this look at this old Farley strip about Easter and compare it to this year’s Farley strip about Easter. The set up is the same, but the punch line is different.
For today’s strip, the original set up is the strip from 1992 with 12-year-old Elizabeth looking to the sky and talking to 16-year-old Michael. Ironically Michael, who makes the same observation at 6 years old to Lawrence, now tells Elizabeth that she’s nuts. To this Elizabeth responds, “I guess some people's thoughts are heavier than others.” That’s a pretty weak punch line, and I can understand why Lynn Johnston might not want to go with it.
Once Lynn Johnston decided to reuse the strip, the next question is in what new-run characters’ mouths the conversation should go. The oldest kids about are Lawrence and Michael, so Lynn chose those. It really fit much better with kids the age of the older Michael and Elizabeth. For the new-runs, I think a better choice would have been John and Elly or Phil and Elly or Connie and Elly, because the dialogue is too sophisticated for 6-year-old kids. It could work with 2 adult characters where one of them is displaying a certain degree of whimsy and the other is not, i.e. Elly would be the one complaining about her cold feet.
As for cold feet, this punch line does not come from any kid. Using the Comic Strip Catalog, I found 3 strips about cold feet and they all related to Elly. In other words, it appears that having cold feet is a problem near and dear to the heart, or rather the feet, of Lynn Johnston. It makes sense then that a cold feet punch line would come up as a substitute from her.
As for snow strips, my all time favorite For Better or For Worse strip is this one.
For today’s strip, the original set up is the strip from 1992 with 12-year-old Elizabeth looking to the sky and talking to 16-year-old Michael. Ironically Michael, who makes the same observation at 6 years old to Lawrence, now tells Elizabeth that she’s nuts. To this Elizabeth responds, “I guess some people's thoughts are heavier than others.” That’s a pretty weak punch line, and I can understand why Lynn Johnston might not want to go with it.
Once Lynn Johnston decided to reuse the strip, the next question is in what new-run characters’ mouths the conversation should go. The oldest kids about are Lawrence and Michael, so Lynn chose those. It really fit much better with kids the age of the older Michael and Elizabeth. For the new-runs, I think a better choice would have been John and Elly or Phil and Elly or Connie and Elly, because the dialogue is too sophisticated for 6-year-old kids. It could work with 2 adult characters where one of them is displaying a certain degree of whimsy and the other is not, i.e. Elly would be the one complaining about her cold feet.
As for cold feet, this punch line does not come from any kid. Using the Comic Strip Catalog, I found 3 strips about cold feet and they all related to Elly. In other words, it appears that having cold feet is a problem near and dear to the heart, or rather the feet, of Lynn Johnston. It makes sense then that a cold feet punch line would come up as a substitute from her.
As for snow strips, my all time favorite For Better or For Worse strip is this one.
posted by howard at 5:32 AM
5 Comments:
Once Lynn Johnston decided to reuse the strip, the next question is in what new-run characters’ mouths the conversation should go.
Ah, but deciding to reuse would require that she actually remembered having used this premise before. I generally err on the side of "Lynn forgot." ;)
aprilp_katje,
I generally err on the side of "Lynn forgot." ;)
Certainly when you look at Michael in pre-school, Deanna leaving Milborough and coming back, and the mysteriously disappearing Nichols boy; "Lynn forgot" is a good choice. However, the reuse of strip setups has happened too often in the last year for me to be on the "Lynn forgot" side, especially when the reuse often seems to have something slightly different about it, as if someone was intentionally trying to avoid accusations of copying her own work. "It's not the same strip. See! The punch line is different!"
Given who appears tomorrow, it wold indeed have made more sense for Annie to wax poetic while Elly talked about practicalities; leave it to Lynn to recycle improperly.
I guess so, but Annie is not usually presented with a sense of whimsy.
The only way this makes any sort of sense is the "All the characters are really a 60-year-old woman" sense. No kid - not even most high schoolers outside the most hiply self-aware ones - would make that final comment.
The genuine kid version would be something like "Can we go now? My feet are cold."
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