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As you may or may not know, Lynn has decided to share with her devoted fans her creative secrets. As expected, she spouts her silly nonsense about hard work and how creativity is something special that only a select handful of people who have a divine gift of getting into some sort of mythical Zone of Creativity can even dare attempt. She says that not only because her fans believe it, she does as well. What I found interesting is where she went into her Zone: her living room couch; since her interviewer knew better than to challenge a steady customer, he didn't laugh out loud when she gushed about the slipshod process by which she crafted the weekly strips nor did he point out that comic strips are a visual and not verbal medium. Her over-reliance on what the characters might say and the unpleasant habit she had of absorbing sitcom-style puns by osmosis go a long way to explaining why it is that the adventures of the Pattersons read like a badly-conceived sitcom peopled with ill-formed stereotypes.
This, of course, is not the only thing that's wrong with the way she does things. I've already covered how she assumes that we know facts that she keeps to herself but what I failed to mention is her unpleasant habit of failing to have asked herself if her experiences in Lynn Lake made sense in the suburb of Ontario in which the Pattersons live. Take, as an example, Mike's struggle with his Halloween costume. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
forworse said, Aaron's attending a Halloween party in a church hall instead of trick-or-treating would go a long way to explaining why the wings had to fit through a door. Since Lynn tried to combine her real-life experience with the Pattersons' lives in a manner that made no sense, she ends up failing. A lot of the more baffling plotlines are probably the result of her doing that.
Looking back, I realize that I already said that when I speculated on the subject of how many strips that have John and Mike not getting along as well as they should would make a damned sight more sense if John were Mike's stepfather. That's the thing about Lynn's bad writing, though; just as she repeats herself, we ourselves are forced to as well.
This, of course, is not the only thing that's wrong with the way she does things. I've already covered how she assumes that we know facts that she keeps to herself but what I failed to mention is her unpleasant habit of failing to have asked herself if her experiences in Lynn Lake made sense in the suburb of Ontario in which the Pattersons live. Take, as an example, Mike's struggle with his Halloween costume. As
forworse said, Aaron's attending a Halloween party in a church hall instead of trick-or-treating would go a long way to explaining why the wings had to fit through a door. Since Lynn tried to combine her real-life experience with the Pattersons' lives in a manner that made no sense, she ends up failing. A lot of the more baffling plotlines are probably the result of her doing that.Looking back, I realize that I already said that when I speculated on the subject of how many strips that have John and Mike not getting along as well as they should would make a damned sight more sense if John were Mike's stepfather. That's the thing about Lynn's bad writing, though; just as she repeats herself, we ourselves are forced to as well.
