Go back to the day before…Stillwell Angel posted the link to the page that’s always the CURRENT day.
Better yet, here is the strip she meant to link to.
Oh, and yes, the one that the link points to is many years old, but it was published today. She’s been doing flashback strips for Sundays for a while now.
This thread reminds me why the only strip I read regularly these days is Pearls Before Swine. I can’t take a comic strip that takes itself that seriously.
Thanks jayjay! I didn’t think about how that link would change from day to day :smack:
What I hate about that arc is that Farley’s death was completely avoidable. The parents knew that April was able to unlatch the gate by herself, but did nothing to lock it up. She let herself out, fell in the creek that runs right past their property, and the beloved family dog died saving her, due to her parents’ negligence. Yet that never seemed to occur to Johnston or the Pattersons.
The Farley saga is a classic illustration of when the strip was good. If you haven’t seen the whole thing, you can go here and click the links to read the whole thing. If you also click on “Farley’s Tree” after you’re done, there are three strips post-death with Farley’s spirit in them.
Thank you, jayjay! I would never have thought of doing that, and now I will.
Ferret Herder, I remember Ms. Johnson talking about this story line in an interview not long after it was published. She said that she had been getting mail from readers who had dogs like Farley and they were complaining that he had lived “unrealistically too long”. She had planned to have the dog character die anyway, but created that story line instead of him just dying.
The issues you raise are valid, I suppose. We all take different things from a story. That story was a little more “realistic” than the average “comic”, complete with near-tragedy and might-have-beens.
I just went there and read it and, yes, I have tears in my eyes. Lovely. Thank you again, jayjay.
He didn’t get hurt saving April. He wasn’t coughing from water intake. Apparently he died of heart failure. Might have happened that same day if there had been no trouble. At least he got to do something important on his last day.
If we’re lucky, the final strip will involve one of the family members triggering a catastrophic fire during a family reunion in a building with limited exits.
I was hoping that Warren had a better reason for showing up at Elizabeth’s door late at night. But no he acts all creepy. Then I was hoping that the little girl would throw a hissy fit at having a new “mommy” and Anthony would side with his daughter and would FINALLY break it off with Liz!
Monday’s strip: So Liz and Anthony are engaged, but not planning a wedding. Uh-kay. And Elly is all set to be the MOBzilla. And she wants Liz to wear a mosquito canopy while walking down perilously steep stairs.
See, I think it’s like this. Lynn Johnston (BTW, y’all, it’s JohnsTon, not Johnson) is sticking it to her kids with these characters. Mike and Liz, who are based on her real kids, are playing out the lives she wanted for them. Mike is an author, like Aaron refused to be, and Liz is a schoolteacher, like Kate refused to be. Neither of them ever married, so Mike gets the 2.4 kids and home in the suburbs, and Liz gets the princess wedding.
Meanwhile, April, who is based on no one, is the conduit for her frustrations with them. Every time she expresses the slightest discontent, she gets smacked down with the reminder that she could be a refugee in a war zone and called retarded. Very probably Lynn’s message to them: “You had a nice house in the suburbs that I paid for! What do you mean, you weren’t deliriously happy to be ignored, marginalized and have your lives planned for you?”
Yeah, and the Pattersons almost lost their youngest child because they’re clueless. Maybe Farley could have gone out in his sleep peacefully, instead of panicking because his human “sister” almost died because her parents didn’t recognize a disaster in the making.
I bet Liz wears that wedding dress that Mike and Dee found in the attic. That was the most obvious use of foreshadowing ever.
Even better…they found it in the crawlspace! Who stores precious fabric items in their goddamn crawlspace?! Isn’t that the original home of mold, mildew and vermin?
AND serial-killer victims!
Hmmm…are they SURE that dress was Grandma Marian’s?
I was just thinking how awesome it would be if Liz tried on the dress and found a finger bone in the sleeve.
There might be some of that, but I think a lot of the creepiness people have developed towards the strip is based on Johnston’s remarkably conservative, reactionary attitudes towards her own gender. In the FBOFW world, the man’s happiness is all that matters; women should not leave their home towns or the protection of their families and shouldn’t have their own ambitions, except for modest ones compatible with the husband’s wishes.
Michael married a milquetoast who happily does all the child-rearing and lives with him in their parents’ old home and seems to exist for no other reason than to do his bidding while he does his “Writing,” whatever that’s supposed to be. Elizabeth tried to move away but was presented with a bevy of dangers, and was rewarded for coming home to Guelph or Barrie or whatever armpit city the strip is based on and getting engaged to her first boyfriend. For this she is rewarded; Anthony’s wife, Therese, is regarded as an incorrigible witch for not being a meek housewife, and the fact that Anthony is openly, brazenly disloyal to her- to the extent that even his beer buddies would tell him “Dude, like, shut the fuck up” - is not regarded as being a bad thing at all. April is treated as being bad for voicing any opinions or having any desires of her own, up to and including having her possessions stolen from her to meet the requirements of one of the men.
I mean, I’m a guy and can be clueless about what women go through, but to me the strip is amazingly hostile to the notion of sexual equality, or at least it has become so.
This comic strip has dropped to the level of Mary Worth, Rex Morgan, and the like in terms of just how BORING it is. And why is it so difficult to distinguish the men from the women in this strip?
The only thing I have to say is where is Jodi? I always get gleeful when FBOFW threads come around, and quite look forward to her commentary on it.
The worst part, if there can be one, is that Lizzie doesn’t even get a proposal and a declaration of passion and love. It was the most non-committal, non-romantic decision to “maybe get married someday, I’ll buy you a ring to keep you happy and taking care of my kid for a while” I’ve ever seen. Unless I missed a strip or two.