Saturday, June 18, 2011

Father's Day

Lynn Johnston’s website comic strip archive has a special collection of Father’s Day comic strips which covers most of the Father’s Day comic strip during the 29 years. However, it doesn’t include all of them and the ones it does include provide a curious history.

The first was this comic strip published on 1980-06-15. It’s curious because it features Elly on the plane with the 2 kids and no sight of John the father. Instead it features a man sitting beside Elly who plays with little Lizzie as she cries on the plane, while Elly thinks, “Now and then when you least expect it, you meet an angel.” The man is balding and fat and so Elly expects the worst from him (displaying Lynn’s early prejudice against the ugly), and so she is surprised when he is nice, i.e. he becomes a surrogate father to Lizzie.

1981 Father’s Day strip was published on 1981-06-21 and does not mention Father’s Day, but it does feature Elly and John eating out at a restaurant while Elly slowly consumes most of John’s strawberry mocha parfait one little teeny nibble at a time.

The 1982 comic strip was featured today, and has the first ever direct mention of Father’s Day in the comic strip.

1983 Father’s Day strip was published on 1983-06-19 and returns back to not mentioning Father’s Day. Instead it features Elly and John talking about the past.

1984 Father’s Day strip was published on 1984-06-17 and starts off with Elly looking in a jewelry store for a watch, which the jeweler thinks will be a gift for someone other than Elly (probably because it’s Father’s Day, but he doesn't mention it). Elly responds that the watch is for her. The comic strip is so out-of-character for Elly, I have the feeling there is a message being sent to someone.

1985 Father’s Day strip was published on 1985-06-16 and shows Elly and Lizzie out on the street observing 3 girls dressed in the Lynn Johnston interpretation of the style of the day. Lizzie stares at them, and when Elly tells her not to stare, Lizzie retorts, “Isn’t that what they want us to do?” There is no appearance of John, nor a mention of Father’s Day; but there is a biting judgment of 1985 fashion. It is not the only time during the comic strip when Elly had harsh words for the fashion choices of young women, but it was one of the first.

1986 Father’s Day strip was published on 1986-06-15 and shows Elly complaining that Farley won’t eat the dog food. John is there and suggests that the reason Farley won’t eat it is because he thinks it’s for dogs and not people. John says that Elly should make the dog food look like people food. At this point, Elly dumps the dog food on a plate in front of John and says, “Here. Make it look good.” Again there is no mention of Father’s Day; but the dad's opinion and suggestion is clearly dumped on.

The 1987 Father’s Day comic strip is in the on-line archive and actually looks like a Father’s Day comic strip. From this point on, the comic strips shown on Father’s Day mention and display a character in the comic strip who is a father, most often John Patterson.

What happened? Well, it’s around this time Lynn Johnston moved from Lynn Lake, Manitoba, a place she despised with a passion and her husband’s home town to Corbeil, Ontario, where she lives today and her mood changed. I have often speculated that the transformation from the very negative tone of the comic strip in the early years into the nicer and funnier tone of the middle years was due to this change in Lynn's life. In the Father's Day comic strips we have proof.

The only exception to this was Father’s Day 2002, which shows John and Elly eating out, but no mention of Father’s Day. 2002 is when the comic strip moved into the darker, serious final years and once again Father's Day shows the effects of it. What happened in 2002 was Rod Johnston, the real-life John Patterson, sold his dental practice and retired with the expectation that Lynn Johnston would do the same. She didn't but the pressure invades the comic strip in this year.

The other Father’s Day comic strips not shown in the on-line archive are these from 1988 and 1996. They are both from the time when Lynn Johnston was at the height of her powers and naturally, I consider them to be two of the best Father’s Day comic strips in the whole 29 years.

5 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

I hope it's just Steph's being too busy to check to see what goes where that's responsible for not putting the absent strips in the Father's Day collection; I know for a fact that I had to alert her to the fact that this year's strip slipped through the cracks so I'd like to think that that's the case with those ones and not, I repeat, not a spoiled child in a sixty-three year old body getting payback.

4:47 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Most of the time, Stephanie is dealing with the comments put in place by the Jackie Levesque's archiving technique, which she did when she was not colouring Lynn's strips in the pre-2008 days, and when the archive was just to help Lynn find things, should she ever decide to check her archive for research. Jackie was clearly not a completist and Stephanie has suffered from inconsistent comments for quite some time. No "Father's Day" in the keywords, means Stephanie's search does not bring it up.

1:03 PM  
Anonymous DeBT said...

This is a little off topic here, but I just noticed that you've stopped giving commentary on the FOOB livejournal. Your last entry was on July the 2nd, giving your point-by-point analysis of Lynn's notes for the Friday strip.
http://binky-betsy.livejournal.com/907094.html?thread=55498838#t55498838

Has the simplistic negative feedback and single-sentence commentary (especially from DreadedCandiru2 who's a extensive abuser of this system) finally driven you away from this site? If so, I'm sorry to see you go, but can understand why, since the quality of the comments has gotten downhill since the REAL end of FBOFW. It must also be disenhearting to see so much virtol aimed at the early strips when it was good, and grasping at straws to find excuses to use for whipping the already dead horse.

Even so, I'm disappointed that you left us without any fanfare, or even a farewell. Sure, most of the people who were fans of the site at the beginning who left once the strip went into reruns wouldn't be familiar with you and your wit, but a simple cortesy would've been a big favour.

Your panel-by-panel analysis of the later strips was a welcome (if slightly insane) level of attention to detail and wonderful interpretation of comics that had basically slowed down to a painful read. Now, the big question is, what are you going to be focusing your impressive observations on now?

7:57 AM  
Blogger howard said...

DeBT,

I stopped doing strip commentary once Lynn Johnston stopped doing new strips back in the summer of 2010. The regular daily commentary stopped in the Spring of 2010, when Lynn stopped doing new dailies. There was a little fanfare at that point, and even a few of Lynn Johnston's former staffers wrote in wishing me well. It's still there, so you can feel free to look back.

At the time I mentioned that I was not interested in doing a point-by-point critique of the art and writing of the reprints from the early 1980s, back when Lynn Johnston was just learning her craft (or rather stealing plotlines and drawing styles left and right from others). She was young and had been given a long term contract to do something she had no idea how to do.

To me, it was much more fun to critique the work of a 30-year veteran, considered to be one of the top 10 cartoonists of the 20th century as she methodically sabotaged and destroyed her own comic strip, going out not with a bang, but with a lot of wimpering.

Since then, occasionally someone will ask me to write up one of Lynn Johnston's travelogues from her website, which I will do because it is new material and it exposes so much of her very distinct personality. Entries since summer, 2010 usually fall into this category. Sometimes I will spot a trend I had not noticed before (like the relationship between Father's Day comic strips and Lynn's living arrangement in this blog entry) and write something up.

4:48 PM  
Anonymous Forcadelta5 said...

PEACE MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS! IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE BLACK, THOUGH, PORTUGAL IS NOT THE COUNTRY TO GO VISITING DUE TO THE EXTREME RACISM THAT EXISTS THERE.

____________________________________________________________________________________

I found that Portugal is in fact the most racist place on earth; especially toward African blacks!
It's as if they have never seen a black person before and the Portugee culture is not only backwards
(as if you steped in a time machine and went to the year 1899) but the citizens where exceptionally
ignorant. It was as if you were talking to a wall rather than a human being. The Portugee also seemed
to be trapped in another dimension of space and time because they kept on talking and mumbling about
the past rather than the present...it was pretty funny actually. I found this website that offers a
Dr.'s opinion about the racism in Portugal and why the xenophobic culture is not just promoted within
but exported as well to everywhere else they may be living. Strange since i've never heard of racism
being described that way before?? Portugal seem to be experts in racism, especially in Canada and the U.S.

http://portugalisaracistcountry.blogspot.ca/

Cheers,
Forcadelta5

5:13 PM  

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