In “For Better or For Worse” right now, the plotline is Michael proposing to his girlfriend, Deanna. I remember a very long time ago, when Michael and I were both children, he had a mad crush on a girl named Deanna. Is she the same girl? I don’t follow the comic usually, so I don’t know. Man, I hope not–I hate childhood sweethearts getting together in ficitonal worlds. . .
I think it’s the same girl. Michael mentioned at one point (when she was in hospital, I think) that he thought she was pretty cute when they both were younger.
I recall that Michael had one girlfriend during his high-school years, another he picked up at his summer job at the Quik-E-Mart (or whatever that supermarket was called)…I think the second one’s name was Rhea.
Deanna was someone he had known as a child, I think, but they’d never had a romantic thing going…he became reacquainted with her when he and Weed stopped at the scene of her auto accident and called for an ambulance. Michael visited her in the hospital, and found out that she was engaged to some guy. She dumped him, then went down to Central America to do the pharmacist thing. Now she’s back, and he proposed on New Year’s.
Did I get all of this right? Please, someone, tell me I screwed it up…I can’t believe that many of my memory cells are storing the FOR BETTER OR WORSE plot-line.
Uke
Does the family in the strip more or less parallel Lynn Johnston’s real family? Does anyone know if her real life son married his childhood sweetheart?
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
Well, here’s another comic-strip question (didn’t wanna start a whole new thread)—what’s the longest continually running strip out there?
I’m guessing Blondie, which started, I think, in 1930 (before Dick Tracy). Unless Winnie Winkle is still running (she started in the early '20s as Somebody’s Stenog). And is my longtime role model Brenda Starr still out there anywhere?
Eve, I think you’re right about BLONDIE. WINNIE WINKLE died about four or five years ago (largely unmourned). DICK TRACY started in 1933, I think, and it’s high time for THAT puppy to go away, too. BRENDA STARR is still running…I believe I’ve seen it in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE…but it doesn’t go back as far as BLONDIE.
Does POPEYE count as a continuation of the old THIMBLE THEATER strip? Because that DOES predate BLONDIE.
Here’s a link to the HOUSTON CHRONICLE collection of funny pages, which someone else posted a few weeks back, and which is pretty comprehensive:
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/comics/archive/showComics.hts?R636187743
Uke
Anyways, it is pretty sad when comic strip characters have a better love life than me.
I think “The Katzenjammer Kids” (or “The Captain and the Kids”) may still be running, which would make it the longest continuously running strip. I knew someone at King Features Syndicate about 10 years ago, who at that time told me they kept it running just so they could hang onto this distinction.
Yes, Michael Patterson’s fiancee is indeed that girl from his childhood.
Uke - His first girlfriend was Martha, the one he met in the supermarket was Rhetta. You’ve got the Deanna story correct.
Chaim Mattis Keller
cmkeller@compuserve.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Uke got it right except for the fact that when Michael first re-met Deanna after the accident she was engaged to someone, but then it turned out she wasn’t ready and they went to the same University, so they got back together, and as part of her education she went down to some foreign place to help people (she didn’t dump Mike). I’ve read the strip. Yes, it mirror’s Lynn’s life, except that she didn’t have a third child.
Uke got it right except for the fact that when Michael first re-met Deanna after the accident she was engaged to someone, but then it turned out she wasn’t ready and they went to the same University, so they got back together, and as part of her education she went down to some foreign place to help people (she didn’t dump Mike). I’ve read the strip. Yes, it mirror’s Lynn’s life, except that she didn’t have a third child.
Ive also read in an interview with Lynn that while the strip more or less parallels her life, there’s a delay in the strip of about two years so as not to plague her family and friends by chronicling their crises as they happen.
It does not matter that we are descended from the apes; the important thing is not to go back. – Richard Wagner
Surgo: Whoops, bad expository writing on my part. I meant Deanna dumped the FIANCE, not Mike.
ScarPimp: So we could spy on the cartoonist, and know two years in advance what’s going to happen in the strip? Nifty! So the dentist-husband becomes a nitrous-oxide junkie, the grandfather dies and starts floating around on clouds a la THE FAMILY CIRCUS…
Chaim: Thank you for the list of Mike’s women…all I remember of Martha is Mike’s mistaking her father’s reference to a “little dinghy” as a reference to HER.
BTW, those Canadians sure have a way with foxy women’s names, don’t they…Martha, Rhetta, Deanna…sounds like three inmates of a Sales Clerk Retirement Home.
Uke
I don’t know about The Katzenjammer Kids– which I last saw in a newspaper about 1962–but the oldest one I’ve seen running continuously is Gasoline Alley. (Original artist Frank King died in 1969, and was succeeded by Dick Moores, who I think died in 1986. Jim Scancarelli draws it now.)
The only other ones I know of to have survived even to the 1980s are Popeye and Nancy’ but Ernie Bushmiller died about 1983, and I haven’t seen the Popeye strip in over ten years.
At King Features Syndicate you can find current Katzenjammer Kids comic strips, and probably others you thought were long gone.
My husband has the current copy of the Guiness Book of World Records (the shiny silver Millennium edition) that confirms that the Katzenjammer Kids is indeed the longest running strip.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy