The Itch You Can’t Scratch

With today’s reprint of For Better or For Worse, we see the eternal curse of the cast wearer – the itch. On-line advice says to not use hangars, but to try baby powder and blow dryers. Some recommend antihistamines. This website offers a cast scratcher which looks like it might work. None of the on-line advisors suggest hitting the cast with your fist. Sorry Lawrence.

This is a unique storyline for Lynn as far as I can tell. Two other times Pattersons end up in casts: The one where John drops the frozen turkey on his foot and the one where Meredith goes down the stairs on one of her toys. In both of those cases, the issue with an itchy cast never came up. I guess Pattersons must have skin that doesn't need scratching. In other words, we have a realistic storyline for this comic strip involving a cast. Enjoy it while it lasts.

What’s coming up?

If Lynn continues on reprinting the strips in chronological order, tomorrow we get to return to the Connie and Phil storyline from March 13-14, 1981 and we will finally find out who the "'Allo?" girl is, since Lynn Johnston already told aprilp_katje, she was going to do that.

We have the March 13-14, 1981 strips not reprinted. March 23, 1981 is not reprinted but it is part of the Farley training sequence which was mostly reprinted last year. I could see Lynn skipping that one. That leaves March 26 and 31 not reprinted for 1981. That’s 4 strips total, less than one week of dailies. After that all the dailies starting from Monday, April 6, 1981 have not been reprinted. If I were Lynn, I would try to synchronize April 6, 1981 to Monday, April 5, 2010. That’s close enough to make holidays match for most holidays except Easter. To do this, Lynn needs the rest of this week + 4 more weeks of new material. That's a lot for a woman who only did 6 new-runs last month.

With this little material left from March, 1981 to reprint; by next week, we should know if Lynn is going to jump back to reprinting the April, 1981 material, or if she is going to add new-runs to try to even out the timing between 1981 and 2010. If I were to guess, I could see her doing a few new-runs and then going back to reprints and repeating that sequence a few times. There’s no need to rush on synchronizing the dailies because of the situation with the Sundays. However, because the dailies and the Sundays have different deadlines, Lynn does not think of them the same way. She could easily go to straight reprints on the dailies, while still doing new-runs on Sundays.

Lynn has already reprinted all the Sunday strips throughout March 1981, and she has reprinted April 12, 26; May 3, 10, 17, 24; and June 7, 14, 21 of 1981. The Comic Strip Catalog lists Sunday, April 5 as missing, so I doubt that one will appear. April 19 is an Easter strip, so Lynn is probably saving that one for Easter, April 4, 2010. May 31 is an extremely outdated Women’s Liberation strip, but that certainly hasn’t stopped Lynn before when she did her “chauvenist pig” strips. Nevertheless, it could explain why Lynn jumped over it when she reprinted the other Sunday strips.

If February, 2010 is any indication, 3 of the 6 new-runs in that month were Sunday strips, leaving 3 new-runs for the dailies. I can easily see Lynn continuing this method for awhile until the Sundays line up. After all, when it comes to lining up strip publication dates with holidays, the Sunday strips are the strips which are most often used to show them, not the dailies. In spite of Lynn’s prediction that she will start straight reprints in Early Spring, the Sunday strips fly in the face of that prognostication. There were many Sunday strips in 1980 which were not reprinted, which she could use; but she hasn’t gone back to 1980 since she reprinted a few daily strips in November, 2009. You have to go back to July 26, 2009 to find a Sunday strip where Lynn stepped back in time. She seems to prefer moving forward, at least for right now.