dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with lynn: failed creator

As we've seen before, Lynn has a rather odd habit that defines who she is as an artist; said habit is her paying just enough attention to something she likes to copy it and not enough attention to realize that the desired thing is not an ironclad rule. As by way of example, she only thinks that hovercars are the only way to show her readers that a car is in motion; she misread a quotation that said that it was a funny way of showing something in such a manner that she thought that a quirky style was the One True Path.

Something akin to that seems to explain the forced-looking punchlines and non-existent comic flow of a large number of strips. As other commentators have said, the only way a lot of the more baffling attempts at non-humor make any sense is that if you assume that Lynn starts with the punchline she wants first and works backwards; my guess is that she half-read this in a guide book long ago and turned a handy little trick into divine writ.

This would be a harmless enough quirk save for one thing: she lacks the creativity and imagination needed to do a proper job of working backwards; the end result is that the landscape of Pattersonian history is littered with the wreckage of collapsed jokes.

Now it seems to me that the simple little column that Elly the intern has been assigned won't give her much of a chance to stretch her vocabulary; as we saw from the encrustations of ill-understood polysyllabic words in the stomach-wrenching excerpts from Stone Season, the only real difference between it and "Sum kids were lost an'then were found!" is that the latter example of Mike's having all the insight of a baked potato was his love of padding his blank-witted verse with big, big words. That being said, Elly was forced to have to stick to dull grey facts and use small words because the big meanie editor wanted to have room for the adventures of the local Bantam A hockey team.

She did better when submitting her awful poems about how small, frightened children who want their mother to comfort them should be pounded into silence so Mommy could sleep and how doing laundry because she's too stupid to teach her children to put their clothes away properly is an existential horror; that's because the editors thought that she was parodying the whole martyr mom meme instead of giving them a look at the greasy interior of the mind of a narcissistic jerkass.

The person who spent the most time cursing the evils of the blue-pencil tyrants is, of course, Mike; from bitching about how unfair it was that he didn't get most of his story about his vulture-like hanging about and getting in the EMTs' way when Deanna drove off the road published to snarling at his boss when he couldn't get his petty revenge against a busy woman who treated him like the nonentity he is printed, Mike bellows and screams at the cruelty of having to have his tosh, bad grammar, ludicrously inept punctuation, baffling misuse of words and misspellings turned into legible English.

In this, he is much like his creator. As we all know, the one thing that is guaranteed to turn the terrifyingly perky Lynn into a belligerent jerk is when someone corrects her piss-poor writing style. She insists that her glaring errors must stand because she knows what she's doing, little realizing that she's revealing herself to be a petulant child who won't follow the rules because it just isn't in her to do so.

In her latest podcast, Lynn finally got around to answering all the people who asked her if she'd ever thought about starting the strip again. Rather than simply tell them that the Strip Of Destiny is the last word on the Pattersons because she had no interest in what happened to them after the Settlenuptuals and to stop asking questions like that, she did what I half-expected her to do and hid behind her medical issues. That, as I said, was at the least expected.

I also expected her to say that if she did start things up or have them started up for her, Elly would have to be single and more or less trying to find her way in the dating world. That's because I remember that she can't or won't depict anything that she isn't herself currently experiencing. What I did not expect but should have is the means by which John would be removed from the picture. I expected them to drift apart after the kids left because they realized that they had nothing in common or, if he had to die, the peaceful passing-away in his sleep I'd earlier discussed. This was foolish of me because I'd forgotten exactly how much Lynn loves her grudges and hates being slighted.

Ordinarily, this takes the form of scurrilous ad hominem attacks on people who barely remember what they did to offend her but in this instance, it means that John would have to die in a revolting and undignified manner so as to balance the scales in his creator's twisted psyche. I don't know about you but something tells me that Lynn's target demographic are not fans of Spike TV's 1000 Ways To Die and might not exactly appreciate his exiting this world like a villain from the Locher years of Dick Tracy.

As you know, I spent about a week or so speculating on what we might see in what I referred to as 'the Tome Of Destiny' and what Lynn once vaguely referred to as a glimpse into the Pattersons' future; I'd also contrasted that to how things would happen in reality given what we saw in the strip and how people behave outside of Lynn's weird fantasy capsule and come up with a far less positive picture than the one she'd have painted. About a few months ago, I'd sort of realized that it was just another project that Lynn had dropped because it was kind of a lot of work and, well, she'd prefer to rush through things because she hates to have to do basic research. Going over her files, you see, would mean that she'd have to spend more than thirty seconds thinking about what happened and she judges that as being to be too much to ask of her. Recent developments have put a new, even less reassuring idea in my head; given that she recently gave

aprilp_katje the lazy, snippy teenager's answer "Stuff happened, 'kay?!!" to the adult question of "Why is Elly just now getting her first year English" (as well as the less strident "Good question; I have no idea" to my inquiry as to what Georgia's original last name is), I finally stopped thinking that she bothered keeping records to ignore in the first place. She'd far rather be captain of HMCS Ineptitude and steer herself right into the Abyss of Failure than limit her creativity by uncool, unfair and boring consistency. What makes it all the more annoying is that her need to not be bothered with continuity only expresses itself when people point out the gaping holes she left in it; when people praise her for the research she's too lazy and flighty to do, she boasts about how great a fan of it she is.

Okay, I know I promised that I was going to put a full stop on the whole Connie and Ted thing but Lynn's vague comment about maybe marrying them off so we could 'prove' once and for all that he's not husband-and-father material might well have been fairly entertaining because of what Lynn thinks that a husband and father should be. In her world, a real father is a stern, distant, unapproachable figure who can only ever interact with the small, strange people that he, for some reason, shares his living space with when it suits him; this means that Ted would probably do something wrong like be there for Lawrence when it was inconvenient and say crazy things like how children don't only cry to make parents feel bad. We might also well see him not paying lip service to adapting to serve Connie's needs; he might actually reform and be the sort of failure people feared Anthony might become: a man who was willing to take his wife seriously. Heck, their marriage might well have been healthier than the Pattersons which would make him pure evil in a black polo shirt.

In one of her recent notes, Lynn referred to the annoying romantic triangle she'd imposed upon us as her first experiment on writing a story arc wherein the family took a back seat to the supporting characters. The problem with this is that, well, she'd ended up pleasing no one here because her need to use the Pattersons as a sort of Greek chorus to tell us how screwed-up Ted was (as evidenced by John's disproportionate and quite frankly pointless rage) or how big a victim Connie was made them look like jerks. The end result is that she stopped pretending the love lives of incidental characters were mission critical and had the Pattersons react in a mildly amusing manner to the comings and goings of the people around them. The first example of this more sane trend was either Connie's off-camera romance with Greg or the business with Mrs Baird. In both cases, Elly and John made tepid jokes about something that they knew wasn't their business; the downside is that Lynn's love of having the Pattersons play cupid wound up causing atrocities like Mike and Liz's visits to Exile Farm, Mike's super-impressive kiss-off e-mail, the Big Fat Fake Wedding and the Settlepocalypse.

As we all know, Mike and Lizzie are slightly younger than the human beings Lynn swears that they're not based on. To start with, Lynn subtracted a couple of years from Aaron and Katie's ages so that we could see the Patterson family from the beginning of their story. What we also have to contend with is that Mike and Liz aren't the same number of years apart in age as the Johnston children are. Lynn has always made a meal of how she did that on purpose but, well, she might, as

howtheduck suggests, simply be trying to make a virtue of something necessitated by her inattention. There were a few years where she simply seems to have lost track of how old her characters were and, just as she tried to explain away the missing strips in a manner that blamed a courier for her own slipshod habits, she's crowing about how she meant to do something she stumbled into.

The interesting thing about the twenty-nine year long run of the strip is that it's about a year too long for Lynn's purposes. This is immediately noticeable whenever I summarize a classic strip; what usually happens is that something that appeared on, say, 17 March 1982 gets reprinted on 16 March 2011. This seems like a minor quibble until you realize that this extra year is pretty much why we had to look at a bunch of new-ruins that echo the last great arc of that era: as before, we have John getting gobsmacked because Mike can't do a adult-sized chore that well. What we should be looking at instead is Elly getting her knickers in a twist because of her fears that John will have too good a time at the convention he's attending and moaning because she can't get it through her thick skull that the Valley Voice can't afford to pay her. This would not only make it easier to line up holidays better, we could have also avoided the worst excesses of the new-ruin era; not only would Farley have appeared in time for the book without having him appear before he's supposed to, we could have avoided Deanna's yoyoing to Burlington, the amazing disappearing Richard Nichols and, best of all, removed the long-distance romance of Connie and Phil from play.

As I hinted at yesterday, I have a problem with the film genre known as the "chick flick"; that problem is that it's something of a reactionary fantasy created by people who have a lot of negative ideas about women. As someone once observed, the perpetrators like women the same way they like their coffee: shrill, submissive and stupid (and not black). This means that instead of being asked to identify with the sort of strong, intelligent capable women that scare the throwbacks who write the movies, we end up getting an endless array of vapid twits who need a man to keep them from starving to death owing to their own stupidity. The thing I've noticed is that For Better or For Worse has a lot in common with chick lit in that it purports to be the voice of all women everywhere but features a "heroine" who's a shrill harpy who, while talking about male oppression and how it's keeping her down, is a dimwitted fool who doesn't have what it takes to succeed in the real world and thus leeches off her long-suffering husband and who gets her nose out of joint because people ask her to care about needs other than her own. By presenting a canting, subnormal, irrational, entitled and hypocritical parasite as a heroine, Lynn has done all women everywhere a great disservice.

One thing that I've noticed about the upcoming finale to the comic strip Cathy is that most of the players in the industry are genuinely sorry to see that Guisewite is retiring. From Pearls Before Swine's Stephen Pastis on to Stone Soup's Jan Eliot, there's a feeling that a largish void will soon need to be filled. This is because she's a lot better company than Johnston; her strip might be somewhat dull and a bit past its prime but I've heard a lot of good things about the woman herself. Another reason is that, well, she actually is saying goodbye as clearly as possible. Granted, she's a little bit cagey about her motives but that's to be expected. My mind tells me that she's getting out now because she finds herself identifying with Mom a lot more than she does Cathy and, well, probably promised herself that she'd retire if that started to happen; my gut tells me that she can explain it away however she wants to. That's because I prefer a mildly dishonest motive to Johnston's terminal case of ending fatigue. Although it is possible that we'd get Zombie Cathy in a few months time, we wouldn't have to deal with the endless failed exit strategies Lynn has blighted the page with. The Hybrid, the Settlepocalypse, the New-Runs and the current Straight Reprint era all remind us that someone cannot be troubled to leave gracefully.

As you probably know by now, Lynn's publisher has announced the up-coming publication of the first of the promised hard-cover treasuries. The collection, whose name is "Something Old, Something New", has an announced publication date of November 2010. The promotional copy describing the book and the title itself are indicative of the content; as

howtheduck tells us, it is very likely that the book will not, after all, contain the strips which appeared in the first years of the strip's real history. Well, to be fair, some of them will appear but they will only really start to line up with the strip's real past when we see Elly start to get bent out of shape due to her misapprehension that John's buying a stereo means that she cannot buy an electric can opener. Before, the ones that do come from 1979 to 1981 will not be in order and will be surrounded by new strips that alter their meaning.

Having read that description, you will be as disappointed as he and I both are to know that instead of the real history, we will be asked to plop down 20 or 30 dollars to buy a hard-cover book filled with new-ruins. The premature disappearance and baffling reappearance of Deanna, the mysterious fate of the Nichols children, the tasty mustache of Phil Richards and more will all be there to show Lynn's utter apathy as to the continuity of her strip. Since the damnable thing is exactly two years less a month long, it also explains why the experiment went on as long as it did; we had to endure everything from the saga of Frank and Fred the fish to Elly yelling at John for going to what she thought was the right cabin too so as to have enough to fill the new book. This, of course, meant that her earlier statement about the changeover occurring when the story was strong enough to stand on its own was a lie; to be lied to about THAT is yet another disappointment. It should be noted that

howtheduck's suspicion that the only new artwork that Lynn will do from now on is for the covers is also correct.

Now that Lynn Johnston is down to her last two new-ruins, I'd like to return to my roots for a while and talk about some things about her strip that still bother me. The first of these is her leaning far too much on her friendship with Charles Schulz; quite frankly, the only real influences I see is the muppet-mouthed yell that characters make when confronted with frustration and the fact that the Mike of the Earliest Years looked like Linus's evil twin. As

howtheduck has noticed, the new-run Sundays that have appeared of late could be collapsed into four panels without losing any meaning; it seems odd that someone who was supposedly so influenced by Schulz didn't pick up on his ability to create a Sunday strip that needed every panel to tell its story. I can edit panels out of a new-ruin and have it make sense; if I tried that with the adventures of Charlie Brown and the gang, I'd alter the meaning of the thing.

As by way of example, let's contrast this example of a kid saying the darnedest thing with something that I photoshopped together; you will notice that it tells the same story in much less time. (You'll also notice that editing out the SNIFFA-SNORFA-SNUFFA-SNOOFFFA that originally cluttered the page doesn't subtract any meaning either.) An interesting thing happens when you try doing that with 'Peanuts': you change the meaning of the strip to one extent or another.

Before I get to John Darling and how Batiuk pretty much pulled the same stunt Jim Davis did when he had someone, possibly Jon Arbuckle, step on Gnorm the Gnat so as to execute the lead character of a failed creative endeavor for his inability to catch on, it has come to my attention that I am not, after all, done with the Pattersons. There are a few left-overs from the Foob deli counter that need to be used before they go bad so here goes.

The first thing that I've noticed is that Elly loves to think that John doesn't want her to do certain things even though he never said that she couldn't. As by way of example, it would probably astonish him to learn that he was some sort of cheap, heartless ogre who stood there and told Elly "You can't have an electric can opener ever because I'm the boss of everyone"; it would especially bother him coming on the heels of being told that he "really" meant that she couldn't go out on her own at night when he said "How come you get to keep track of my comings and goings like I'm a prisoner when you stand there screaming about how I'm trying to chain you to the stove when I only asked why you didn't phone and tell me when you'd be home?"

The second thing is that there were a lot of strips that had alluded as to how Christopher Nichols was "meant" to be Lizzie's Twoo Wuv; time and again, we saw that her teal and lavender fantasies rotated around The Boy Next Door. Sadly, Christopher had to disappear into the mist because Lynn walled his family off from view in order to not deal with her first failed marriage; her solution was to create what they call a 'Jonas Quinn' to replace Chris. What she did was take Chris, slap glasses and freckles on him and call him Anthony.

Lastly, I can readily see that Lynn will never really make any sort of announcement about the end of the new-run era; this is because we can look forward to a lot of new strips on Sundays and ineptly-modernized reprints during the week. We can call this time period the Delocalized Years.

It seems to me that the transition to straight reprints cannot come soon enough; that's because a rather sinister phenomenon is reasserting itself. Simply put, Lynn's strange belief that people don't age at all well comes into play; this means that the young, cute Elly that we see in the reprints has to share the page with the haggard, old-before-her-time mess I call the Elly-blob. As I said long ago, Lynn seems to inhabit a different world than the one you and I live in. In her world there are no active seniors who look forward to the time they have left (instead of back on the time they've lost) and sixty means one is either infirm, senile or dead. This, of course, means that after the oh-so-brief period wherein people are young and beautiful, they look the way Lynn thinks they're supposed to; this is why Gordon and Tracey Mayes, who are about twelve or so years younger than I am, look not like my contemporaries but like my elders. You can't tell Lynn that, though; in her mind, they look the way thirty is supposed to. This odd belief is the reason that Connie is the closest we get to a "Hot Mom" and why her ultimately futile need to stave off the ravages of time is comic fodder. Elly might hate what she sees in the mirror but she's smug about having earned every frown and worry line and can't see why people would rather not look like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and Agnes Skinner.

As you might recall, I once made a rather nasty joke about how when Connie met the mysterious woman at Phil’s apartment, her reaction would be to excuse herself in an awkward fashion and then run away crying without doing something that normal people would do in such a situation and asking the mystery woman who she was and how she knew Phil. This is, sadly, because I understand how Lynn’s mind works; you and I could think of a thousand perfectly harmless things that Allo Girl could be but Lynn cannot. Lynn’s one-track mind tells her that if a woman is at a man’s house, she can’t be anything else than his girlfriend; we saw that when we were all baffled by the insane conclusion that Liz jumped to when she saw Susan at Paul’s house three years ago. This tells me that Lynn thinks that she has explained who Allo Girl is and that we need no further information; since we were set up to think that Phil would break Connie’s heart because he’s a cheating cheater who cheats, that’s what she’s “given” us. Second, since we’re not going to hear things from Phil’s perspective, it’s clear that Elly lied when she told Connie about he thought because she never discussed the matter with him in the first place. The problem, of course, is that it violates the future continuity of the strip. That's because when Georgia actually does first appear, the Pattersons go out of their way to explain to us that commitment-phobic Phil has finally started a serious relationship; what's more, the very idea of his cohabiting shocks Elly because not only is it an example of the double standard, it's something she never thought that he would ever do. If Lynn were paying attention to her continuity, Elly would tell Annie that Connie met Phil's landlady, Mrs Untel; since we have to deal with her biases and inattention, we're in for a mess that gratuitously maligns Phil and wrecks the flow of the story.

The problem that I have with Lynn's travelogue is not simply that she's a dozy tourist who doesn't want her preconceptions challenged or her mind sullied by thought or experience. I could forgive that were her prose style not so barbarous, pompous, silly, grim and moronic that it made traveling to a distant country sound as thrilling as watching grout mildew. So far, we've seen the following errors in logic and style:

Spelling Errors: Lynn seems to have a rather poor grasp of how words are spelled at the best of times and hates to be corrected owing to a belief that she's in the right. This allows us to bear witness to such irritating things as 'canvass tents' and 'hoards of people'.
Usage and Punctuation Errors: Just as she's convinced that she's a competent speller, she insists on inserting commas when they are not needed and leaving them out when they are.
Errors in Vocabulary: When she is not trying to impress us with needless verbiage, she uses vulgarisms such as "grub", "duds", "spuds" and "the biff" to project an image of counterfeit folksiness.
Errors in Story Logic: When she isn't subjecting us to mood whiplash by going from being confused and saddened by a traffic accident to being thrilled at the prospect of dining in an exotic locale, she stops short of drawing logical conclusions. Case in point: She likes the scenery but finds it boring and then wonders why people left the area.
Overemphasis of biases: It's not bad enough that her paternalistic world-view and boredom with the really exotic shines through; she has to go the extra mile and remind us of her love of the scatological.
Perspective Failure: Simply put, she doesn't seem to realize what her audience might find interesting; I, for one, had hoped to be enthralled by her description of an elephant ride. Rather than realize that someone like me might find that more interesting than her misandry or snacking, she makes what could have been exciting sound boring and ridiculous by focusing on her fascination with bodily wastes and ignoring the wonders that surround her.
Taking things out of context: She has the annoying habit of introducing unfamiliar concepts without giving us any background material that would explain what she's talking about.
Refusal to seek out information: The reason that we have to search for the names of the places Lynn has visited is that she seems to see finding out what they are beneath her. Sadly, this smug refusal to add to what she knows is such a common thing, I almost forgot to include it here.

When you put all her sins together, you get a rather unpalatable mess of a story that sounds like the maunderings of an old windbag who can't write talking about things that wouldn't interest other people. Her managing to siphon all the allure out of Thailand can thus be called a sort of malign miracle.

howtheduck seems to have noticed a pattern developing in the Sunday strips Lynn is using to replace the classics she used last year. As we know, the strip for 17 January 2010 contained recycled devices from older strips. As happened before (or will happen again depending on your point of view), an adult, usually John, sees a child building something in the snow, takes over and, after he's done, finds out that the child is inside where it's warm. The strip for 31 January 2010 has elements from a strip from 1991 that has Elly complain about gum left in the clothes, a sequence that has April running around cutting things with scissors and all the times that we've seen Patterson children take orders in a literal and humorous fashion. This means that we should probably check the Sunday strips to see how much classic material she uses; why she does so, of course, is easier to figure out. Her reasoning seems to be that if it worked before, it'll work again. It also allows her to 'fulfill' her promise of expanding the storyline before April when she goes to straight reprints; by showing us things that look familiar, she can tell people that she's establishing patterns of behavior in the Patterson household. (This, of course, assumes that she's thought that far ahead.)

The real reason that I'm sort of disappointed that my prediction that we would return to the Evil-because-he-was-able-to-get-away-with-things-Elly-didn't-have-the-courage-to-try-Phil and Clueless-because-she-needs-a-MAAAYYYYYUUUUNNNNN-Connie show is that it's yet more proof that Lynn simply doesn't care about the continuity of the new-ruins. So far, we've seen the following plot points be advanced only to be retracted because they make the straight reprints harder to explain:

The age and number of the Nichols children was the first change in 'history' to be reconsidered; as we know, Lynn started out with the idea that Christopher was Mike's contemporary and Richard Lizzie's. Since she doesn't want to spend the next few years changing dialogue, she simply 'forgot' that she'd changed the number and age of Annie's kids and set things back to right.
Her attempt to correct the premature disappearance of Deanna, as I said when it came up, raised a lot more questions that it supposedly answered; we were, after all, asked to accept Lynn's interpretation of how house sales worked without being allowed to point out the absurdities.
Mike started out taking a bus from kindergarten, which Lynn called preschool, and then started taking the bus for the first time when he got into first grade.
Elly supposedly already took an extension course only to drop out but now is the first time this has happened.

This is sort of a marvel, in an odd way; anyone can forget details but it takes someone special to be that apathetic about it.

As you might have seen, Lynn has posted a blog entry about her visit to a convention in Gatineau, Quebec. When you subtract the irrelevant noise about her roommate, blank-eyed inability to see why people are on strike and chirpily casual admission that she can't speak French, a picture emerges. That picture is of a woman who seems to expect to be the center of attention wherever she goes while not taking the time to know what's going on around her. She clearly doesn't seem to understand that the comics form is appreciated outside Quebec or that she's simply another creator of a long-runner. I did notice that she seems somewhat overwhelmed by having to the target audience of her book just before she admitted that she might not have any book-related news for next year. It seems that Farley Follows His Nose was something of a disappointment so it might take her a while to go back to the well.

As we've seen in the past, Lynn takes a rather annoying logical shortcut by assuming that similar things are the same thing when they clearly are not. The result, of course, is to make her look somewhat foolish; you and I can see that a five year old boy and seven year old should not be confused owing to their being at different phases of development but Lynn does not. She sees them as being similar in age so it seems to her that they must naturally think and act in similar ways. This odd belief has come into play with Elly's night school class; since Lynn sees Contemporary English Lit and Creative Writing as being similar enough to be interchangeable, she behaves as if they're the same thing and says so. The result, as we'll see, is just as disappointing as the yo-yoing maturity levels of the Patterson children.

Profile

dreadedcandiru2

June 2022

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jul. 10th, 2025 01:58 pm

Foobonia and Points West.

Four Panel Babylon

Entries tagged with lynn: failed creator

Backwards get.....

The editing edition.....

Lynn's murderous fantasies....

The Tome Of Destiny Reconsidered in the Light of Stuff....

Ted and Connie and the world of What IF.....

Ted and Connie and Phil and Lynn and learning from screw-ups.

Further reflections on the missing years...

The year that shouldn't have been reprinted....

Foob: Chick Lit for Dummies.

Guisewite versus Johnston: "How can I miss you if you won't say goodbye?"

The new-ruins and their length: an explanation.

The Inherited-From.....

Fooby Interlude.

The rise of the Elly-blob.

The Unreveal and its implications.

Lynn's leaden tongue

Frankenfoob Fillers

Creator Breakdown a gogo

Lynn the convention goer....

Creative Contemporary English Writing 101-2-3: Elly's class....