Entry tags:

rant

Foobturday
I don't remember when I started reading For Better Or For Worse but I was very, very young. I didn't read comic books as a kid (except for one issue of Scrooge McDuck, the origins of which have become clouded) but I always read the daily newspaper strips. For Better Or For Worse, and later Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes were my favourites. (Nobody ever really liked B.C.)

They were what started me on drawing.

They were also what hampered me on drawing for a long time, since I aped the symbolic, pared-down art of a finished cartoon without having learned the realism and basic anatomy that that art had been pared down from, much to my parents' consternation and frequent unheeded advice. But, like any kid who learns to draw from comic books who is not Rob Liefeld, I went back and picked up the starting points later, after the damage had only partially been done.

The thing about For Better Or For Worse that set it apart from every other strip is that time passes, so I shared the same age--and name, obviously--as Michael. We didn't have much else in common, apart from a younger sister who liked to scream, but I still related to the dude. We also both took journalism in college, now that I think of it.

This weekend, For Better Or For Worse has officially stopped advancing in time. And I am very relieved.

The reason I say "officially" is because the strip stopped advancing in time socially quite a while ago. What's happened to it isn't anything different than what one might expect when encountering a universe devised and controlled by a woman of retirement age whose children have grown: it's stuck in the values of the previous generation. Two generations ago, now.

When Michael married his childhood sweetheart it was cute. When he, after weeks of anvilicious foreshadowing, took over his parents' old house and their two-adults-two-kids nuclear family structure, it was disturbing. When Elizabeth decided that pursuing an independent life wasn't for her and fled back home to marry her blandtastic childhood sweetheart, it was absolutely wrenching, and not in that awesome dramatic way. (Everything you need to know about Anthony is here.)

I saw a parody comic a while back that I thought was particularly incisive.



Also, the blinking panel just kills me. I think the creator should have stopped the strip there, because the rest of it becomes a little too personal, and it's like being an unwilling witness to a domestic dispute at a grocery store. Seems like this artist knows things about real-Elizabeth we don't.

This one shares the theme, and is just as fantastic:



But, as of this weekend, all that stops. Elizabeth and Anthony, while claiming not to want to rush into things, had their wedding as soon as possible so as to get it done before the last sand falls out of Great-grandpa Jim's hourglass. This Sunday was the final chapter of Harry Potter when we meet Hermione's kids. Or whatever.



Every character in the ever-expanding Foobiverse experiences resounding, and often vastly unwarranted, success. They win awards. They own empires. When they do take jobs pumping gas or mowing lawns, the next time you see them they have car dealerships and landscaping companies. It's not good enough for Weed to just be a reasonably happy freelance photographer: he's got to be a world-famous award-winning jet-setting photographer. (Who married a down-home old-school-values girl, of course.) Johnston's been writing Mary Sue fan-fiction of her own work for a few years now--the only difference is that she's inserted herself into the role of God.

I get a little squicked whenever John announces his forever-love to Elly, as he has done frequently lately, because I know that real-life John ran off with a dental hygienist. I'm not saying Johnston should have written that into the strip; that would have been awful. But what she's put in is the polar fairy-tale opposite, and that's awful too.

And that's why I'm relieved it's over.

She's still doing new strips, but she's started back at Year One, when Michael's still getting started cleaning up the Gotham streets, and earning the grudging trust and respect of young police officer James Gordon. In today's strip we see the first Secret Origins of Farley the Dog. Guess which part of that paragraph I'm not kidding about.

Although actually what I like to imagine is that she's ending it the way Stephen King "ended" The Dark Tower, throwing Roland back to the start and forcing him to start the whole quest over. Which means that at this very moment, while five-year-old Michael is experiencing the first pangs of disappointment in his mother, two-year-old Elizabeth is waking up in a cold fever, racked by inexplicable and haunting images of a mustache. And blandness. And unspeakable, clammy horror.

See? For Better Or For Worse is awesome again.