Sunday, May 30, 2010

Lizzie Imitates Farley, Lynn Imitates Her Old Strip

With today’s new-run of For Better or For Worse, I looked through the old strips involving dog food and found many strips where the kids (and grandpa Jim) end up eating the dog’s food. The closest approximation to the strip we had today was this one where Lizzie imitates Farley while sitting beside Farley on the ground. It is actually quite a bit cuter than the one we have today, where you have to guess that Lizzie is going face first in the food in imitation of Farley. Admittedly, you can draw the conclusion from the fact we have 4 solid panels of Farley eating and drinking with Lizzie watching; however, there are also 4 solid panels of Elly getting Lizzie ready to eat to distract you. As usual, the strip suffers from Lynn trying to stretch a 4-panel idea to 10 panels.

I remember my kids, when they were very little, could fall asleep on or in almost anything. We have pictures of my boy passing out with his cute, little head resting on the high chair in a plate of spaghetti. My first thought when I saw the strip was that this was where Lynn was going. I suffered from the “camera in my house” syndrome where readers take some part of the strip and then project something from their life into the story. Unlike many people who suffer from this syndrome, I went ahead and actually read the strip and realized that nothing like this had ever happened in my house. For one thing, my son has fur allergies, and so we have birds and fish as pets.

I grew up with dogs and cats and I feel very certain that if I were being served dinner and decided to eat that way in homage to them, my mother’s reaction would not have been shock. She would immediately correct me and inform me to use my fork or spoon because I was not an animal. I know this from all the years when I received this correction after picking up food with my fingers.

The parts I find strangest about the strip are the drawings of Lizzie’s face. Her jaw shape changes in almost every panel, and some of those faces look like little men and not a 2-year-old girl. In the panel before Lizzie shoves her face in the food, it looks like Lynn has brought in a stunt double. The inconsistency is disconcerting.

Even though the strip is poorly-drawn and executed and uses a joke Lynn Johnston has used before, I can at least take comfort that no character is shamed and no animals were harmed in the making of the strip. By current Lynn Johnston standards, that's a great strip.

11 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Once again, I must ask the question: Has Elly ever interacted with small children or pets before, oh, about a few days ago? The woman is continually completely, utterly shocked, baffled, and horrified by extremely simple, mild, barely-a-problem things.

6:48 AM  
Blogger FDChief said...

Agree that this one is fairly innocuous, with the usual WTF Lynnisms:

1. Will someone get this woman one of those "how to learn to draw" photo albums that show people and animals moving? Dogs don't run like rabbits, they never have, except in Lynn's mind, where they ALWAYS run like rabbits. If her style was squash-and-stretch it'd be obviously intended for comic effect, but with Lynn it comes off more like incapacity. Graphic Art 101, Lynn. C'mon.

2. The final panel doesn't work, so the joke doesn't work. It looks like Nizzie is faceplanting in her food rather than eating it doggystyle. The first time I skimmed through it I thought that Lynn was retconning Liz as narcoleptic and the joke was that she had passed out in her Frosti-Os. I know, it's just Lynn's poor draftsmanship, but it's position just where it needs to be to make the whole massively overblown (and, again, you catch that this strip is grotesquely inflated; it might work as a daily) effort a fail.

10:29 AM  
Blogger FDChief said...

And I should observe that if anything proved that Lynn's original Farley was never more than an irritation to her it is the looooong proximity of child and dog near teh food. Most dogs - most carnivorous animals in general - instinctively defend what they're eating. Their genetics tell them that another animal near their face while eating is trying to steal their meal. Most cats will move away; most dogs will, too, or if they're sufficiently dominant, will growl or snap to worn the intruder off. Clearly Lynn has no idea about this.

10:37 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

Anonymous,

I'm convinced that Elly seems to have spent most of her life in an alcoholic haze; why else is her brain so much like a blasted Etch-a-Sketch?

10:52 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

FDChief,

It would probably quicker to list the things that Lynn can draw than what she cannot.

11:14 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

And why is Lynn pretending Liz was ever a blonde? She and Elly had matching tan hair.

12:23 PM  
Blogger howard said...

Anonymous,

Once again, I must ask the question: Has Elly ever interacted with small children or pets before, oh, about a few days ago? The woman is continually completely, utterly shocked, baffled, and horrified by extremely simple, mild, barely-a-problem things.

That was the style of humour in the early days. Much of the funny (such as it is) of the strip was derived from Elly’s over-the-top reactions to ordinary things. It is the comic strip equivalent of mugging for the camera.

1:42 PM  
Blogger howard said...

FDChief,

If her style was squash-and-stretch it'd be obviously intended for comic effect, but with Lynn it comes off more like incapacity. Graphic Art 101, Lynn. C'mon.

We had a video of Lynn in the studio a few years back, where it was very clear that the kind of art people do where they preplan the perspective of the picture with light sketching is not the style of Lynn Johnston. She just went straight to drawing the strip. There are some artists who can do that. They get the perspective in their head and drawing is just putting the object onto the paper. There are other artists who must adjust, measure and correct to get the picture right. Lynn is in the latter group, but draws like she is in the former.

It looks like Nizzie is faceplanting in her food rather than eating it doggystyle.

This is the single biggest problem with the strip. That single distinction makes the strip funny or confusing. The worst part is that if you checked out the link to the first time Lynn did this joke, she was able to draw that distinction.

Most dogs - most carnivorous animals in general - instinctively defend what they're eating.

Very true. As a kid, I knew not to get too close to my dog when he was eating. He would growl at me.

1:46 PM  
Blogger howard said...

aprilp_katje,

And why is Lynn pretending Liz was ever a blonde? She and Elly had matching tan hair.

That’s a good question. Even as late as last week, the colorist got Lizzie’s hair color right. That and the error on the dog dish coloring when Farley goes to the water dish from the food dish, are uncharacteristic errors for Kevin Strang. It makes me wonder what’s going on. We know that before April 1, 2010 (the date of the News Bites posting about the syndicate trip) Stephanie and Liz went to visit the syndicate, a visit I expected would be the “here’s what’s going to happen with the straight reprints” visit. Stephanie’s appearance gave me a clue that perhaps part of the visit was to let them know that the strips would be coming from Stephanie instead of from Kevin Strang. We know the Sunday comic strips operate 8 weeks in advance and last week was the 8th Sunday strip since they made that visit. Is Lynn using a different colorist?

1:48 PM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

Is Lynn using a different colorist?

Yeah, I wonder...

It is the comic strip equivalent of mugging for the camera.

Which fits, considering how frequently Lynn mugs for the camera.

2:01 PM  
Blogger howard said...

aprilp_katje,

Is Lynn using a different colorist?

Yeah, I wonder...


I posed the question to Coffee Talk, but I don't expect an answer.

Which fits, considering how frequently Lynn mugs for the camera.

What's good for Lynn is good for her strip. Oh! That phrase fits in so many ways.

4:04 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home