Monday, January 04, 2010

She’s a Smoker, She’s a Joker, She's a Toddler

The joke in today’s new-run of For Better or For Worse appears to be that in spite of Elly’s promise to return anything Phil left back to him in good shape, unbeknownst to her little Lizzie is crunching on Phil’s pipe and I suppose is going to ruin it with her 1-year-old teeth which, at her age, are probably just the upper and lower front 4 + canine teeth.

Or is the joke that little Lizzie is crunching on a smoking pipe, one of the more disgusting things she could possibly put in her mouth, so the humour is based on the idea that it’s funny when toddlers take on the more repugnant adult habits? After all, it hasn’t been that long since Lizzie took her first drink for comic effect. This level of humour is not beneath Lynn Johnston.

The part which should be the most interesting is whether or not Lynn Johnston will reprint the “Michael and Lawrence smoke Phil’s pipe” strips, for which this strip is the obvious lead-in. Those strips, as I understand it, were not chosen to make the list of strips to be placed in a book of reprints or as they say in the Comic Strip Catalog, “(We haven't entered book data for this strip yet. Sorry.)” If it was too politically incorrect to show 2 6-year-old kids smoking back in the 1980s book of reprints, will it be too politically incorrect to show them smoking in reprint in 2010? I remember back in 1980, the anti-smoking furor was beginning to hit companies, which started implementing anti-smoking policies. These days, my kids have gotten the big pitch since they were very young from school programs which are anti-drug, anti-drinking, and anti-smoking. The anti-smoking drive, from what I can tell, is far more pervasive than it was back in 1980. Will Lynn Johnston recognize this, or just plow ahead with her reprint plans?

2 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

howard,

The anti-smoking drive, from what I can tell, is far more pervasive than it was back in 1980. Will Lynn Johnston recognize this, or just plow ahead with her reprint plans?

She'll plow ahead with the strips she's got in the can, of course; she doesn't seem to have learned a damned thing from Lizzie swilling beer or the cineplex incident so she's not going to see what a mess she's about to make.

2:20 AM  
Blogger howard said...

It's entirely possible that will be the case. Certainly Lynn has gone through a great effort to make sure that we know Phil left his pipe behind. The difference between this and the beer (background picture) or cineplex incident (brand new strip) is that somewhere in Lynn's past there was a realization of the mess when she was picking strips for her collection book. Of course, that far into the past, it may not have been Lynn who made that decision, but the editor of the collection book.

5:43 AM  

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