:rolleyes:
Discuss amongst yourselves…
I can’t believe she’s marrying her father.
I hate this strip. I think comic strips should be funny.
I’ve been waiting for this thread for a week.
Yep.
Elizabeth settles for Anthony in the most setttling way possible. No romance, no zing, nothing more than reheated left over porridge.
Reported on FBOFW.com:
How long ago was her divorce?
Anthony seems to generate a lot of irrational hatred on this board. I don’t get nearly so excited about cartoon characters, positively OR negatively.
Many of Lynn Johnston’s characters are based on her family and/or people she really knows. PERHAPS Anthony is based on a real person that she has good reason to like, and for that reason, she may ASSUME that everyone reading the strip will like him, too.
I have no strong opinion of him as a character. The one thing I think Johnston has completely glossed over is this: from the very beginning, his ex-wife Therese was presented as an evil bitch. Why was she so bad? BEcause she was suspicious of and hostile to Elizabeth.
Welll… has it completely slipped Johnston’s mind that Therese was 100% RIGHT to be suspicious of and hostile to Elizabeth???
If Therese suspected that Elizabeth and Anthony still had unresolved feelings for each other, and if that led Therese to see Elizabeth as a threat, well, DUH! Again, she was 100% RIGHT to think so.
At the very, very least, Johnston owes Therese a few strips in which to say, “My husband never stopped pining away for another woman. How the hell do you think that made ME feel???”
That’s the biggest part of my annoyance about him - he was railroaded into being Liz’s True Love Forever and if Johnston had to assassinate characters to do it, by god she did. Therese? Evil harpy. Paul? Omg cheater - even after Liz conveniently neglected to tell Paul she wasn’t staying in Mtigwaki so he shouldn’t apply for that transfer to move there, because only a few weeks after he said that and she was head-over-heels gleeful, she found out Anthony had left his wife and flipped out. Warren? Pushed aside, turned into a kinda scary dude.
Anthony? Was kind and supportive :rolleyes: to Liz immediately after her near-rape by telling her that she was scaring him after she recounted the attacker’s progress into a stalker, then whined to her that he “has no hooome!” and begged her to wait for him. While he was a married man with a child! Then Therese conveniently cheated on him and said she was leaving him, so he was no longer quite so much the homewrecker in Johnston’s eyes. It’s destiny he’s fulfilling, after all.
Because Elizabeth has the shiniest hoo-haw in all of Canada, and all men are mesmerized by it…
Yep. That was the last straw for me for Anthony. He rescued her from a rape attempt, then immediately told her he was still in love with her and he was divorcing his wife and please wait for me you’re my last hope of any kind of happiness in the WOOOOOORLLLD!
And meanwhile, to make this possible, Johnston absolutely destroyed the character of every other man in Liz’s life. She led Paul on, actually allowed him to transfer to Mtwigawatchamacallit to be with her, then after he moved told him she wasn’t coming back. And THEN when, after basically being told his girlfriend has abandoned him, he seeks comfort with a girl he’s known since childhood (whoa…maybe they’re the First Nations version of Anthony and Liz!), he’s a cheating asshole.
The last three or four years of FOOB have been a steady decline toward the inevitable reunion of Liz and Anthony, despite the fact that Anthony is a feeble-minded ditherer whose biggest thrill comes from balancing a bookkeeping journal, and Liz, after coming close to actually breaking away from Pattersonville and living her own life, has spiralled back in for a landing in Ellie’s Family Dream.
I remember when April was born. That means that, in spite of being an adult heterosexual male, I’ve been reading this fucking strip every day for the better part of twenty years. Why have I done this to myself?
In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution they print the strip at the top of the right-hand page of comics – right next to Family Circus. I long ago disciplined myself to just slide my eyes past Family Circus; maybe I can learn to ignore them together now. Jesus wept.
What this strip needs is a big ol’ dose of Funky Winkerbean Cancer.
The only thing that redeems my comics page in the Star after this is “Zits” (and also the occasional “Doonesbury”).
A little too “perfect”, especially the ring thing, and I agree with all the criticisms above about these characters. Maybe she’s just trying to wrap this up in a big hurry so that she can end the strip on a high note. “The kids are both married and have their own families. The End.”
Yeah, both kids. Except for April. Lynn will probably keep her in high school and thus in limbo to adulthood forever.
Not even Mary Worth deserves that.
I just want to add that, for a change, I got this one right. I’d put in a link if we could search, but I’ve always figured out this was where she was going.
I’ve known this was where she was going ever since that New Year’s Eve strip when Liz fell on the ice and Anthony got her to the emergency room, with Accent Marks glaring all the way. When was that, about four years ago?
It’s been a week already? 
I didn’t see the OP date at first & thought it was referring to today’s Easter Sunday retro-strip of the much younger family in church. So I didn’t know if the upchucking was inspired by the religiosity or the insipidness of that particular strip.
For me, it was the insipidness (Easter is NOT about “new life blooming” and Springtime, at least not in Church!)
In a fairly recent interview Ms. Johnson said she was going to stop doing the strip since the kids were basically at the point Elly and John were at when she started it. It’s not a “comic” strip in that it was never supposed to be a laff riot, it was always what it is, a gentle, often funny look at “real life”.
Like Baldwin above, I slide my eyes over Family Circus so quick I don’t see it. I do that with a number of “comic strips”, mostly Rex Morgan, MD, my gawd, that SUX.
I like it FBOFW ok, sometimes it’s been excellent. Farley, anyone? And, she said sadly, I’ve never seen the conclusion of the Farley thing. I know what happened, but somehow missed actually seeing it.
I must say it makes me laff a bit - just a bit - to read the venom directed at the artist for writing the story the way she wants!
When I click that, all I get is a piece of pious glurge (many years old, as Michael’s still a little kid) about attending church only on Christmas and Easter. It’s certainly upchuck-worthy but I’m not sure it’s what you’re talking about.