Images of irritation.

As we have seen, Lynn seems to have a, shall we say, simplistic view of the world which blinds her to how people really make their livings. This is why she has John stand there all day feeling miserable as he drills into the mouths of reluctant mutants, it's why she thinks that being an author is a matter of holing up in an inner sanctum and churning out verbiage, it's why she thinks that a pharmacist is a glorified shop clerk who wears a smock and counts out pills and it's why she thinks that professional musicians are freaky beatniks who rebel against all societal norms. This last tendency comes into play when Phil appears; that's because he's a bizarre, logic-defying amalgam of Maynard G. Krebs, Dr Teeth from the Muppet Show and Arthur Fonzarelli; what he isn't is an accurate representation of the man he's supposedly modeled after. The reason I mentioned this is because I remember reading somewhere that Alan Ridgway, Lynn's real-life sibling and thus the basis for the Phil Richards character, asked that Phil be demoted to an ancillary character that only appeared every year or so because (from what I am given to understand)  he didn't like what he saw; from what I've been told, Phil was such a distorted version of the real man, he couldn't stand the sight of him. By doing so, he's managed to achieve something that Lynn's ex-husband and children have not by prevailing on her to not use them as fodder for future strips. It should be noted that this impulse probably baffles Lynn herself; she seems to not be aware that people might confuse the real people with the funhouse mirror versions of themselves people read about and how that might affect her loved ones negatively.