Kinda surprised that there’s been no discussion (that I can find) about the final weeks of For Better or For Worse as it winds down its run – not with a bang, but with a whimper. Not to mention a veritable orgy of teal, lavender and glurge.
First, stroke victim Grampa Jim has a heart attack and can’t attend the wedding, causing his daughter Elly about five minutes of mild concern before she flaps back to soak up her share of the glory. Worse, she doesn’t bother telling her children about Jim’s crisis (including the bride, although the only reason Liz pushed up the wedding in the first place was 'cause she wanted Jim to be there). Still worse, she cracks a joke about Dead Jim Walking to her brother.
And worst of all, when the ceremony is over and Liz is finally told about Jim, Elly is horrified by Liz’s desires to rush to the hospital fresh from the sacrificial altar. “You just got married to the bland, passive aggressive, emotional adulterer of our dreams, thereby reaching the apotheosis of your womanly role! Why on earth would you leave the celebration of your settling for mediocrity just to visit a dying man you love?”
Y’know, Lynn Johnson has really let me down over the past two years, but I didn’t think she’d bring this much fail in her sorta-final strips. (“Sorta-final” depending on what her plans are this week, that is. Girlfriend can’t make up her mind about what to do with her future.)
So what do others think? Will Jim die just as Liz and Granthony – re-enacting their vows for his sake in the hospital room – say the words “for better or for worse”? Or will he not be permitted to shuffle off this mortal coil, remaining a frozen-in-time, bedbound curmudgeon for eternity? Only a couple more days left to get those predictions in…
Actually that’s not the plan (as of this writing, anyway!). LJ is planning to reboot the strip, starting from the beginning with reruns that she’s allegedly going to re-draw or tweak to bring the style in line with her more modern stuff. She intends to fill in some storyline gaps, including apparently bringing Farley into the story earlier.
Or something. She changes her mind every five minutes so it’s a little hard to keep up.
I gave up as soon as I realized that neither the cop or the pilot was going to swoop in and save the plot from Fail. God, why couldn’t the rapist have crashed the wedding? That would have been awesome! Or why couldn’t grampa have keeled over during the wedding, rather than before?
The only reason Liz went from ‘we’re together and not in any particular hurry to declare or do anything else’ to ‘get married NOW’ is supposedly due to her being reminded that her Grandpa Jim was in poor health. So instead of spending a lot of time with him, she spent weeks tearing her hair out and terrorizing her family members with a rushed wedding. Because wasting all of that time with throwing together a big ceremony instead of a) spending quality time with grandpa, or b) inviting grandpa and close family/friends to a Justice of the Peace ceremony (or one with a minister but small and simple), is just so much more important to her.
So of course Jim has a heart attack on the very day of the wedding (probably after thinking about the horrible alterations done to his first wife’s dress), and though he can only say pretty much one word (yes), he manages to convey that of course the wedding should go on without him and that the bride shouldn’t be told.
Meanwhile April is the only Patterson shown spending real time with Grandpa Jim (barring a token visit/caretaking from Elly), yet we don’t get to see her rushing to his bedside in this strip. She was probably left behind at the church and told to clean up.
Oh, and since Johnston has more-or-less finally admitted that she based her characters on her real family, my hope is that she will let Grandpa Jim die. It sort of felt like she was subjecting him to strokes and letting him live unhappily and being unable to communicate as a way of taking out her long-concealed rage at her abusive mother, who her father didn’t shield her from.
That being said, if she does let him die she’ll surely work in a “till death do us part” reference to fit it into the wedding. Gag.
That sounds good to me! I wish she’d just retire already. I never read it when Michael and Lizardbreath were babies and I didn’t realize how bratty they were. They were destructive brats, and their mom hated having them around. I never realized how awful this family is. They’re not cute, and they’re not even likable or interesting. Please, just retire, and let Grampa die in peace!
We’ve had several threads about the end of FBoFW, but they’ve mostly expired through lack of interest. Today, the Washington Post ran an interview with Lynn Johnston, in which she revealed her latest plans for the strip:
Just because she has no need to be bitter, sarcastic or maudlin–why should that stand in her way? This article also appeared–telling of the multitudes who hate what the strip has become. (I’m one of them.)
The WaPo is dropping FBoFW from the print edition, beginning next Monday.
The strip’s Official Site includes biographies of important characters, written by a staffer. Today, Anthony Caine’s bio finally appeared. If you’re interested, use your favorite search engine to find the site. I refuse to be responsible for projectile vomiting! It’s really, really bad. Bad Fan Fiction Bad.
And today, he goes from frail and “we’ll see” in the first panel to “fine” in the last! Meanwhile, April continues to be left in the dark about her beloved grandfather’s health.
I’m so glad I took this off my daily comics queue about a year ago. As a nice guy myself I tried to identify with Anthony-but it turned out that he was instead a Nice Guy, where all epithets and descriptions of him in this thread indeed apply.
I am convinced that it is a very rare strip which doesn’t become zombiefied-or crash and burn as FBOFW has-after 10-15 years or so. Watterson and Larson were indeed wise, Breathed less so, while Johnson sold the soul of this strip a few years ago.
