Man, how did I know what this thread was about before I clicked on it? Must mean I’m a big FBOFW fan!
I think that the teachers overreacted, myself. They sent a note home on first “offense” for a simple smooch? Who knows what Elly and John think that they were doing to warrant a note home! So, they overreact. So, April overreacts.
Do any of you read the “Letters from the Pattersons” on the FBOFW website? Each month, a letter to the audience is written from each main character’s point of view and posted on the website. These letters are interesting because they go into a lot of background areas that don’t come up in the strip. This is not, for example, April’s first kiss. One of her letters this summer revealed that she kissed a boy at camp. Also, a letter from Elizabeth a few months ago had the slightly disturbing revelation that Liz planned on buying her little sister “sexy underwear” for Christmas :eek:! February’s letters, once they are up, may shed some light on this situation.
I guess I lived in a bad part of town or something. Several of my friends lost their virginity at thirteen and at sixteen, I was the last holdout. That was back in the early/mid Seventies. Actually, I was the only one who hadn’t been pregnant by sixteen. This was in Burnaby BC, more or less a suburb of Vancouver.
We were definatly kissing by twelve. I doesn’t surprise me at all that April is beginning to notice boys. I’ve sort of lost track of FBOFW lately. I used to keep up with it on a comics website, the one on linked to the Teeming Millions webpage. Guess it’s time to check in again.
For some odd reason I couldn’t post to this thread last night.
Anyway, I just wanted to apologize to Trinopus if I offended him. His question reminded me of the wankers who post in here and say, “Oh, and because this is the Pit, shit fuck cunt whore prick felch asshole muthafucka!”
To elaborate on this - FBOFW is one of those unusual comic strips in which everyone ages at close to the expected rate. Farley had already lived longer than you’d expect from that breed of dog, and it would have been very odd for him to continue forever in a realistic comic strip. Johnston was going to have to write him out of the story. Because Farley had been such a big part of the strip for so long, she chose to have him die as a hero rather than writing about multiple trips to the vet that end with The Shot. If Johnston had never added April to the strip, she still would have had to come up with a story arc that ended with Farley dead in order to preserve the integrity of the strip.
Grin! I hope I’m not quite in that league! And, in truth, I have “lurked” the SDMB, reading it daily for about a year now. It took me that long to work up my nerve to join in.
I apologize to Zebra for using sarcasm instead of a milder form of inquiry and/or reproof. In a way, it is a tribute to Lynn Johnson’s storytelling skills that Zebra came to feel that Farley was “real” enough to be worthy of “life,” rather than merely a cartoon character to be written out of the plot.
There was an old B.C. cartoon, where one character asks, “What is it that makes us walk, and talk, and live, and breathe?” And the other character says, “Contented readers.”
