The elephant in the cineplex

[dreadedcandiru2]

When I first saw last Sunday's strip, I expected a certain reaction on Coffee Talk based on what I'd seen before. Let's use the strip that had Elly steamroll Michael into agreeing that throwing away the rest of his Halloween candy was a good thing as an example of said trend. We started with people who think like we do angrily denouncing her for being a bully, ogre, idiot and twerp; this was followed by the usual reminders that it was simply a comic strip and thus not worrying about and letters that explained that we didn't see what we thought we did. The consensus amongst Lynn's defenders is that Elly thought she was helping John in his campaign to protect the family's teeth. This led me to expect that we'd have seen letters that referenced Amber alerts as well as comments from retail workers who resent the implication that they're free babysitters for the Ellys of the world followed by rebuttals that stated that a) Elly was actually in the same theater as Mike only we couldn't see her, b) if Lynn says they're old enough to go by themselves, they're old enough to go it alone, c) let them have childhoods, pickyfaces or d) get a life, they're not actually real unless they do something I like. What we saw was one letter that questioned Elly's parenting chops floating in a sea of letters about everything else. This tells me that whoever's in charge of screening Lynn's e-mail didn't want to touch this with a ten-foot pole but didn't want it to look like the subject was being totally ignored; they're probably waiting for the heat to die down so they can move on.

Comments

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

I think the whole operating paradigm of the Coffee Talk has changed. It used to be that we would see the snarking comments on Monday, and then the rest of the week would be Lynn's defenders rising up to challenge the snarkers with their own bizarre brand of logic. The Coffee Talk monitor, presumably Beth Cruikshank, would use the inflamatory comments to inspire the other comments, and that easily created enough material to fill the week.

Even though Beth may have originally liked this idea, the problem with those kinds of comments is that Beth has to go through and screen out all the ones with bad words and the like. If she has hundreds of these, then that could take some time. It is a lot easier to find a few complimentary ones using a keyword search and drop those in.

That could be the reason for the change, but I suspect it is of a more practical nature. I have gone back through those old "Connie in Montreal" strips and there are a lot of them, starting with an original publication month of February. Stephanie has nicely put together the Comic Strip Catalog and one of the side-effects of showing original publication dates with the old strips is that now it means that Stephanie can time-synchronize the reprint strips's publication time with the today's calendar. If that is the case, then once "Connie in Montreal" starts, that is going to take up the bulk of February.

Lynn is on vacation through January 5 according to her website. The strips run 6 weeks in advance. If Lynn Johnston keeps her promise to go to straight reprints in Early Spring, then she could very well have finished all the new-runs she plans to do. She could already be done.

The Coffee Talk, aside from giving fans a means to express themselves, has also been used by Lynn Johnston to find errors in her material, as we saw with the Nichols boys error and the Deanna Sobinski error. If the new-run material is all done, then Lynn no longer cares about controversy. And if Lynn no longer cares about controversy, where is the motivation for Beth Cruikshank to weed through hundreds of comments asking her how Elly could be so irresponsible? There is none. That's new current running theory.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

the new-run material is all done, then Lynn no longer cares about controversy. And if Lynn no longer cares about controversy, where is the motivation for Beth Cruikshank to weed through hundreds of comments asking her how Elly could be so irresponsible? There is none.

No, there isn't; there also isn't any real need on our part to actually monitor the Coffee Talk now. I mean, all we get is three letters about how the usuals love Ellie's column.