What Kind of Daughter Am I Raisin’?
I get back from a Boy Scout backpacking trip and what do I find? New material from Lynn Johnston. It figures she would do this while I was gone. Let’s take a look:
Panel 1: John is putting Elizabeth in a high chair with no straps and he doesn’t remove or lift the feeding area to get her in. The chair looks like it is built for lifting. This is John we are talking about, so maybe this is to indicate his ignorance.
Panel 2: John is tying a bib on Elizabeth while she is being kept occupied with a spoon which, judging from her eyes, seems to have put her in some kind of hypnotic trance. After this, the spoon only appears in the even numbered panels. I guess it is not an odd spoon.
Panel 3: John has a giant bowl of Oatmeal With Raisins! to feed Elizabeth. We don’t see John cooking said bowl, so who knows how we got here. Nevertheless, Lynn Johnston has wisely put the box there, so we will know what is is . To be honest, I wouldn’t know what John was feeding her – rice with peas? Yes, I know that the American Academy of Pediatrics has raisins on their choking hazard list. Once again, the Pattersons demonstrate bad parenting.
Panel 4: In this panel, the part of Lizzie is being played by Popeye the Sailor Man complete with popped eye and jowls. Lizzie thinks, “?” Popeye is a questioning kind of man, so it seems reasonable to do this homage. Nevertheless, this appears to be more proof that this is a food Lizzie has never tasted before, i.e. an indication of how rare this event is for John Patterson. In the meantime, Lizzie is still holding her own spoon and flinging food off of it. How did that spoon get anything on it, if John is feeding her by hand? Where did it go in Panel 3?
Panel 5: The talented Lizzie spits out 3 raising with one Ptooh!
Panel 6: Lizzie spits out 3 more raisins with Ptooh, Pttt, Ptoohh, Pfttt. 4 sound effects. 3 more raisins. And this while John is still trying to feed her. Also, our last appearance of the spoon, which disappears by the time we get back to the high chair in Panel 9, possibly eaten by the leftover raisins.
Panel 7: Seeing that his child doesn’t like the raisins in the oatmeal, John does the thing most parents do in this situation. He picks her up from eating. After all, if she is spitting out raisins, then she is obviously not hungry.
Panel 8: Upstairs John goes, and for some strange reason, it looks like he is going up on his knees.
Panel 9: In the meantime, Elly wanders by, coffee cup in hand, and sees the regurgitated raisins. Will she react as expected and start screaming about the mess John made with Elizabeth? Will she notice that the raisins have increased from 6 to 13, thus “raisin’” the question about whether the raisins have started independently multiplying?
Panel 10: No. She just eats them, except for the 2 she misses, while she appears to have hired her crotch hand to hold her coffee cup for her. Now, her son Michael, in essentially the same situation, turned the raisins down. Elizabeth on the other hand, has developed a new habit of spitting out raisins, which will appear again in this strip.
There were many things my son and daughter spit out during their high chair years, and I don’t recollect ever wanting to eat it after they were done with it. It is a rare strip when Lynn Johnston writes about Pattersons doing something disgusting but that seems to be the trend with her new material. After all, it hasn’t been that long since Lynn did the strip with John humping the Super Vac. Maybe Lynn thinks the strip should be "For Better EWW Worse".
Panel 1: John is putting Elizabeth in a high chair with no straps and he doesn’t remove or lift the feeding area to get her in. The chair looks like it is built for lifting. This is John we are talking about, so maybe this is to indicate his ignorance.
Panel 2: John is tying a bib on Elizabeth while she is being kept occupied with a spoon which, judging from her eyes, seems to have put her in some kind of hypnotic trance. After this, the spoon only appears in the even numbered panels. I guess it is not an odd spoon.
Panel 3: John has a giant bowl of Oatmeal With Raisins! to feed Elizabeth. We don’t see John cooking said bowl, so who knows how we got here. Nevertheless, Lynn Johnston has wisely put the box there, so we will know what is is . To be honest, I wouldn’t know what John was feeding her – rice with peas? Yes, I know that the American Academy of Pediatrics has raisins on their choking hazard list. Once again, the Pattersons demonstrate bad parenting.
Panel 4: In this panel, the part of Lizzie is being played by Popeye the Sailor Man complete with popped eye and jowls. Lizzie thinks, “?” Popeye is a questioning kind of man, so it seems reasonable to do this homage. Nevertheless, this appears to be more proof that this is a food Lizzie has never tasted before, i.e. an indication of how rare this event is for John Patterson. In the meantime, Lizzie is still holding her own spoon and flinging food off of it. How did that spoon get anything on it, if John is feeding her by hand? Where did it go in Panel 3?
Panel 5: The talented Lizzie spits out 3 raising with one Ptooh!
Panel 6: Lizzie spits out 3 more raisins with Ptooh, Pttt, Ptoohh, Pfttt. 4 sound effects. 3 more raisins. And this while John is still trying to feed her. Also, our last appearance of the spoon, which disappears by the time we get back to the high chair in Panel 9, possibly eaten by the leftover raisins.
Panel 7: Seeing that his child doesn’t like the raisins in the oatmeal, John does the thing most parents do in this situation. He picks her up from eating. After all, if she is spitting out raisins, then she is obviously not hungry.
Panel 8: Upstairs John goes, and for some strange reason, it looks like he is going up on his knees.
Panel 9: In the meantime, Elly wanders by, coffee cup in hand, and sees the regurgitated raisins. Will she react as expected and start screaming about the mess John made with Elizabeth? Will she notice that the raisins have increased from 6 to 13, thus “raisin’” the question about whether the raisins have started independently multiplying?
Panel 10: No. She just eats them, except for the 2 she misses, while she appears to have hired her crotch hand to hold her coffee cup for her. Now, her son Michael, in essentially the same situation, turned the raisins down. Elizabeth on the other hand, has developed a new habit of spitting out raisins, which will appear again in this strip.
There were many things my son and daughter spit out during their high chair years, and I don’t recollect ever wanting to eat it after they were done with it. It is a rare strip when Lynn Johnston writes about Pattersons doing something disgusting but that seems to be the trend with her new material. After all, it hasn’t been that long since Lynn did the strip with John humping the Super Vac. Maybe Lynn thinks the strip should be "For Better EWW Worse".
posted by howard at 5:47 PM
21 Comments:
This is the way the new-run world ends--not with a bang, but with an "ew." ;)
You could be right. It would be funny if this was the last new-run.
The funny thing is not that Lizzie hates raisins or that Michael is less of a disgusting pig than Elly; the funny thing is that there are a legion of weird people out there who think it's a mother's job to do what Elly did. We should probably steel ourselves to the horrible possibility of an angry letter from the ineffable Mister Inman defending Lynn's right to let her avatar be revolting.
Is Lynn's avatar so famished that she'll eat anything anywhere anytime, like a dog picking Kitty Roca out of the catbox? What sort of freak eats loose raisins off a highchair tray, anyway?
I can't even get an "eew" out of this. It's pure "WTF?"
DreadedCandiru2,
We should probably steel ourselves to the horrible possibility of an angry letter from the ineffable Mister Inman defending Lynn's right to let her avatar be revolting.
I am actually looking forward to it. Back when Lynn did all those Farley abuse strips, it was very interesting to see Inman rise up to inform us that he abused his dogs too, even though he loved them.
FDChief,
What sort of freak eats loose raisins off a highchair tray, anyway?
Loose raisins covered with semi-digested oatmeal to be accurate, and I don’t know what sort of freak would do that. We’ve seen through Lynn’s travelogues that her eating habits have gotten strange, so maybe this is a reflection of the real-life Lynn, when she visited one of her friends who has a small child.
We’ve seen through Lynn’s travelogues that her eating habits have gotten strange, so maybe this is a reflection of the real-life Lynn, when she visited one of her friends who has a small child.
Yeah...but...can you imagine standing there with your limpet-child clinging to your leg watching your friend hold her coffee cup with her crotch-hand and eat your child's slimy spit-out raisins off the highchair tray with the other? Don't you think you'd say something along the lines of "Ummm...Lynn...what the...look, I have some Triscuits if you're hungry...those are really...what the...STOP!"
More than anything this says to me that Lynn has gotten to the point where she has 1) become utterly barren creatively and is reaching for something, anything to create these strips, 2) gotten past the point of caring and is just phoning it in, or 3) gotten to the "whee, who gives a flying fuck!" stage and is doing this stuff just to see how far she can push the envelope before giving it all up for suds, grub and cabana boys.
To be a fly on the wall...
Oh, man--you just know if Lynn opened a bar, she'd name it "Suds 'n' Spuds."
FDChief,
Yeah...but...can you imagine standing there with your limpet-child clinging to your leg watching your friend hold her coffee cup with her crotch-hand and eat your child's slimy spit-out raisins off the highchair tray with the other?
If I were to actually see such a thing in real life, I am not sure that I would be able to say anything. I think I would be speechless.
More than anything this says to me that Lynn has gotten to the point where she has 1) become utterly barren creatively and is reaching for something, anything to create these strips, 2) gotten past the point of caring and is just phoning it in, or 3) gotten to the "whee, who gives a flying fuck!" stage and is doing this stuff just to see how far she can push the envelope before giving it all up for suds, grub and cabana boys.
I think we have seen evidence of all these choices. There have been so many new-run strips in the last year that were lifted almost directly off of her old / coming-in-the-future strips, it is clear evidence of the barren creativity. The raisin-eating strip falls into this category easily.
April Patterson,
Oh, man--you just know if Lynn opened a bar, she'd name it "Suds 'n' Spuds."
Absolutely. Suds ‘n’ Spuds: Where all the food is fried and the healthy food is simply less greasy.
"...it is clear evidence of the barren creativity. The raisin-eating strip falls into this category easily."
I'm not so sure - this one really smacked me as a big "who cares!?" (or "Whee - who gives a flying fuck!?", if you will).
It's SO grotesque and foolish that it doesn't even really work as phoned-in crap. It's like a mid-90's "Saturday Night" sketch that's so lame its over before it even really begins, you're actually angry with about midway and dismissive at the end.
I know that Lynn doesn't care anymore, but you'd think she'd at least be trying to keep whatever circulation she has. This crap is NOT going to help keep anyone with the program outside the KAN. She's got to consider herself lucky that newspaper comics are a dead medium. If anybody still gave two picoshits she'd have been turfed off most of the comics pages quite some time ago.
But they don't...we've come a long way down from Windsor McKay and Will Eisner.
FDChief,
I know that Lynn doesn't care anymore, but you'd think she'd at least be trying to keep whatever circulation she has.
I think Lynn did try to do this to a certain degree. Instead of going to straight reprints, she tried the hybrid and then the new-runs. I suspect a strong motivation for this was to make an attempt to keep her readership, while at the same time getting to take vacation, and still keeping creative control (creative is a relative term here). A number of her interviews to promote Farley Follows His Nose showed Lynn Johnston ignoring the book promotion aspect of the interview to focus on saying, “Hey! My strip still exists!” She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. From a money-making aspect, the smart thing she could have done was to hire someone to ghost her strip. Her readers would get to keep their beloved modern characters, Lynn could take all the vacation time she wanted, and the syndicate would be happy with little-to-no loss of circulation (assuming Lynn didn't hire some idiot to ghost the strip). It would mean Lynn would have to give up creative control, and considering the junk she has been producing, you would think this wouldn’t be a problem. Nevertheless, it was.
But they don't...we've come a long way down from Windsor McKay and Will Eisner.
That is true, but historically speaking, great art in comic strips does not necessarily mean great sales. Winsor McKay is known for his artistic masterpiece Little Nemo in Slumberland, but his best-selling strip was Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Little Nemo in Slumberland was not syndicated, and was published in just one paper, the New York Herald. It is a testimony to the quality of his work that anyone knows about it at all. Will Eisner is known for his The Spirit insert which, at its height appeared in twenty major market newspapers with a combined circulation of 5 million readers each Sunday. In comparison, For Better or For Worse, at its height was seen in over 2000 newspapers, easily exceeding both Eisner’s and McKay’s readership.
True. But I'd be willing to settle for Al Capp, Walt Kelly, Milt Caniff and even Sparky in his prime, if you'd call that settling.
It just seems like the best comic work isn't going to the newspapers. There's a ton of interesting, creative work going on...it's just that the newspaper strips don't seem to be doing it. Is it the restrictions of a four-panel format? The syndicates? I have no idea, but after Berk Breathed and Bill Watterson hung 'em up (and I mean the Breathed of the old Bloom County, not whatever the hell he was trying to do over the past couple of years...) it seems like the comics page is a wasteland left to Lynn, the loathsome Browne clan, the undead zombie Sparky, and (shudder) Jim Davis...
I'm not saying that we need everyone in the funny papers to be freaking Hal Foster. But would a LITTLE creativity, energy, wit and passion be too much?
FDChief,
There's a ton of interesting, creative work going on...it's just that the newspaper strips don't seem to be doing it. Is it the restrictions of a four-panel format? The syndicates?
What has happened is that the newspapers have forgotten the single, most basic, principle of having comic strips in the newspaper: The comic strips are in the paper to sell the paper. Old time newspapers constantly shifted the strips of the paper in and out depending on whether or not they thought they were selling the paper, and oftentimes had strips which were developed by their own editorial cartoonists, so they would have things no other newspaper had. Winsor McKay, Chester Gould and Bill Watterson were all editorial cartoonists in addition to having a comic strip. These days newspapers don’t pick comics based on sales but on public opinion polls, which only tells you what the people who are already reading your paper want to read. The newspapers get the standard top 20 strips from the syndicates, which means their paper offers nothing different from any other paper, or more importantly, anything you can get on-line.
As far as Lynn Johnston goes, she has also forgotten this basic element and is now trying to sell a reprint strip, which will not sell papers except only to her most fervent fans. Her fans that read the strip the first thing every day, left when she stopped doing the modern characters. Certainly no one not buying the paper will say, “Oh, the Herald has just picked up 29-year-old reprints of For Better or For Worse. I will subscribe to the Herald so I can read them.” If newspapers remembered the basic element of having comic strips, they would drop Lynn Johnston, and pick up the latest, cutting edge, trendy strip that everyone is talking about. Not only would it be cheaper than For Better or For Worse, but it might actually sell a few papers.
"These days newspapers don’t pick comics based on sales but on public opinion polls, which only tells you what the people who are already reading your paper want to read."
And that has the effect of making the lineup on the comics page the product of a self-selecting group composed of the sorts of people who will take the time and effort to answer a poll about comics. From what I can tell these folks are the sort of people who make up the KAN - they WANT to read Hagar, Garfield, and zombie Sparky.
ISTM that most of the really interesting original stuff is happening on-line, or in comic and 'zine form. And the syndicates and/or the papers are doing nothing to coopt it.
It's like the newspapers have just given up TRYING to pull people in with their comics, the same way that most papers seem to have given up trying to pull people in with original content and are just churning out wire-service pieces and Chamber of Commerce press releases.
It's one thing to claim that the e-media "killed" the dead-tree newspapers. But from here the perp doesn't look so definite - looks a lot like suicide to me.
FDChief,
From what I can tell these folks are the sort of people who make up the KAN - they WANT to read Hagar, Garfield, and zombie Sparky.
That is usually the case. However, I can’t blame them. How would any mass of them get exposure to anything else so they could pick anything else? When I was younger, the only way I knew about other strips was when I was on a trip and picked up a paper in a different city. In the old days, the newspapers would try to pick up strips becoming popular in other newspapers, and the editors were the ones responsible for finding and supporting creative new strips.
ISTM that most of the really interesting original stuff is happening on-line, or in comic and 'zine form. And the syndicates and/or the papers are doing nothing to coopt it.
The papers have grown very dependent on the syndicates. What the syndicates used to do would be to promote their own new strips by packaging them with their more popular strips. “You want For Better or For Worse? You can have it, but you also have to buy this new strip." They may still do that, for all I know.
It's like the newspapers have just given up TRYING to pull people in with their comics, the same way that most papers seem to have given up trying to pull people in with original content and are just churning out wire-service pieces and Chamber of Commerce press releases.
That’s certainly the case in Tucson, Arizona where I live. The local paper slashed almost all the local reporters except for the sports section and the front page news. Movie reviews are now all purchased from other papers, and the local arts coverage almost completely disappeared. As a cost-cutting measure to save the local paper, the local paper managed to cut out almost all the things I read the paper for. Local news has for years been more quickly reported on local television, so the things you look for in the paper are the things you don’t get on-line or on television. For some reason, the papers don’t seem to get that.
“You want For Better or For Worse? You can have it, but you also have to buy this new strip." They may still do that, for all I know."
I wouldn't be surprised; the Oregonian has some strips ("The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee" is the one that jumped to the front of my head as I wrote that) that seem to have no local following or genuine value but pop up from time to time, last until the every-two-years-or-so readership poll and then go away never to return. I kinda suspect that's why the chestnuts like "Apartment 3G" and "Judge Parker" hang on - maybe the syndicates package them as part of "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury".
The strip I'm sorry the O doesn't carry is Batiuk's "Funky Winkerbean". We've got his "Crankshaft" (which is a piece of work in it's own right...) but "Funky"'s train wreck of morose morbidity makes it incredibly fascinating, like a reality show about assisted suicide or terminal cancer. I'd trade half a dozen "Crock"'s and "Luann"'s for a daily dose of Batiuk's bizarro Miseryworld.
FDChief,
I kinda suspect that's why the chestnuts like "Apartment 3G" and "Judge Parker" hang on - maybe the syndicates package them as part of "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury".
The “Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” I can easily see as a package strip. I have only ever seen that one on-line. “Apartment 3G” and “Judge Parker” have been around so long, I expect they have their own fan base and don’t need that kind of support. Who knows? Maybe because they have been around so long, they need that kind of support. I will agree that “Funky Winkerbean” has its own area of fascination and certainly is leagues away from the strip I remember clipping out back when I was in a high school marching band with a director with maniacal tendencies similar to that of the band director in that strip. It’s almost always well-drawn and you can tell the writer cares about his strip, which is the single biggest reason For Better or For Worse started going bad in my opinion.
No argument about Batiuk's draftsmanship; he's one of the better pen-and-ink guys around (admittedly, the "artistic talent" bar for the daily comics page is set pretty damn low) short of the Frank Cho ("Liberty Meadows") league.
Thing is, I remember the old "Funky", too, with the band-camp/meglomanic-high-school-music-teacher theme (wasn't there some sort of running joke about the band's goat mascot, too? Dunno.) and the general sort of Doonesbury funkiness to the artwork. Batiuk's draftsmanship has gotten an order of magnitude better as his outlook (at least as expressed through the strip) has gotten several orders darker.
I still wonder about the domestic serial strips of the "Judge Parker" sort. The demographic there has GOT to be beyond geriatric. I have to wonder if their persistence is purely inertia.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any strip comics you're particularly fond of that are out there on the fringes of the comics page, the sort of thing that might get some ink if crap like Lynn's stuff, zombie Sparky and the Brownes weren't making jack off the funny pages?
FDChief,
I still wonder about the domestic serial strips of the "Judge Parker" sort. The demographic there has GOT to be beyond geriatric. I have to wonder if their persistence is purely inertia.
I like “Judge Parker”, but you may consider me to be beyond geriatric. Nevertheless, Harold LeDoux was the artist for years and produced some of the finest art on the comics page, in my opinion. He was followed by Eduardo Barreto, whose work I admired quite a bit also, even though it was very different from LeDoux’s style, until he got sick and had to quit.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any strip comics you're particularly fond of that are out there on the fringes of the comics page, the sort of thing that might get some ink if crap like Lynn's stuff, zombie Sparky and the Brownes weren't making jack off the funny pages?
I don’t do much looking around. The Arizona Daily Star is the newspaper in my area. It is hardcore for the top 20 strips and is barely surviving. There’s aprilp_katje’s Crazy Guy and Not Jesus. I liked Amy Mebberson’s Rose, while she was doing it. There are some other webcomics I like and follow, but I can’t see any of them ever being on a newspaper page.
howtheduck! I came here all ready for your snark on the latest iteration of "dogs and John take a long time to go to the bathroom"! :)
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