I thought the artist was going back to the old strip and republishing it with a little tweaking. That seemed accurate, as I’ve been remembering bits and pieces of it as it goes along.
However, I don’t remember squat about this latest stuff about the visiting brother and the lovesick neighbor. Was this in the old strip? Or has Johnston just thrown the whole “reboot” concept out the window and is trotting out new soap opera?
I remember the brother and neighbor story.
I thought the plan was to go back to the time of the childhood of one of the characters. I understood that to mean that there would be a mix of old and new strips telling the story of the young girl.
From the Wikipedia page
I thought she was going back and rewrite it in order to piss off her ex-husband.
She is definitely doing that now. Anytime he appears he is shown as a clueless, insensitive dolt.
Yes, but you didn’t get that exciting strip in which Connie asked Elly to look after Lawrence for a week while she went to Montreal to pursue Phil! It’s essential for Lynn to fill in these crucial gaps in readers’ knowledge!
Seriously, that’s what LJ is currently doing. Re-running old strips and old storylines, with new strips to fill in details that didn’t need to be filled in. Today’s strip, for instance, is a slight reworking of an old strip. Don’t ask me why this is necessary.
Is there a popular cartoonist in the entire history of the medium who was more of a psychoanalytical slideshow than Lynn Johnston? The entire strip is an ongoing look into her head, and a lot of it is kind of ugly. Her near-Paleolithic adherence to traditional gender roles - I suspect there’s some Daddy issues there - xenophobia, resentment about not having a third child, her painfully liberal-of-convenience Canadian politics, and of course her attitude towards her husband/ex husband just flows through the strip while she steadfastly denies it’s there.
:: shrugs ::
I thought it was funny.
Isn’t this is the whole point of a reboot: to be able to rewrite the past?
Are you guys now going to tell me that Star Trek isn’t a reboot because they nuked Vulcan?
Please tell me I didn’t have to spoiler that.
I had successfully suppressed all memory of that movie from my mind, leaving only a command never to watch it again. And now you’ve reawakened the recollection in all its terrifying detail. You bastard.
Sure, when you change enough to make it interesting. If you tighten up the story, or create a backstory people actually want to know about, that’s a reboot worth reading/watching. But Lynn is just floundering around. Like a few months ago when she had first-grade Deanna move away. Lynn apparently didn’t remember until afterwards that in the original run, Deanna didn’t move until during or after fifth grade. So she had her abruptly move back…and all that did was eat up time. (Well, that and give us some creepy strips with six y/o Mike channeling Hugh Grant.)
The problem is, in the early years of the strip, it was a linear story about a bland suburban family. Michael had a teasing crush on a classmate; it wasn’t supposed to be a foreshadowing. Connie was interested in Elly’s brother, but she was simply a lonely divorcee. Lawrence was presented as being the offspring of her ex-husband; this jazz about Connie getting knocked up in South America by a doctor, and then coming back to Canada and marrying a totally different guy was a later invention.
Unfortunately, Lynn is stuck with the soap-opera plot points that were established in the '90s. She and her readers now know Deanna will marry Mike, so every strip with the two of them has to be out of a rom-com. Lawrence’s disappearing dad had to be referred to, which means Connie is more damaged than she was originally portrayed. It just doesn’t work. She can’t, and I’m not sure anyone else could either, splice the heavy and involved later era with the lighthearted early years.
She definitely has issues. She was quite badly abused as a child by her mother.
She pissed readers off no end when she married Liz (in the strip) off to bland Pornstache Anthony, thrusting him upon us like a demented matchmaker (“look at this solid, hard-working single dad - he has a good job! your parents have known him for years! he will give you a good middle-class life just like your mom’s! what’s not to love, he is perfect for you!”) So Liz gave up her interesting teaching career way up North, and her interesting romance with First Nation hunky cop Paul, and came back to Dullsville and married her perfect match with about as much passion and enthusiasm as you would expend buying a case of TP at BJ’s warehouse. … I don’t know what Lynn is thinking she’s doing, but she has a lot of dim fans who clip out her strips to tape on the refrigerator.
That’s interesting, because the strips of late that drive me freakin’ nuts are the “OMG what an awful mother I am!” ones, like this.
/sneaks up behind Skald and applies a Vulcan nerve pinch, then a Vulcan mind meld.
/wipes memory of latest Star Trek movie and replaces it with happy, happy afternoon at Rosecrucian Unicorn Barb-B-Q and Empire Raising.
Skald, should you have a sudden urge to send me fine Belgian chocolates, just go with it.
I gather the consensus is… “worse” ?
Cathy Guiswite?
Hell, I would have left Johnston if it meant I didn’t have to read her crappy comic strip anymore. I don’t care how much money she has.
It’s an excellent movie.
My respect for you is sufficient that it survives your occasional tendency to spout such non-sequiturs.
In other matters, does anybody know why I have this urge to send **phouka ** a box of chocolates? Because I can’t figure out whether I should send the exploding or the non-exploding variety.
Ah well. I’ll just make it half and half.