Foobonia and Points West.

If you will remember, I made a wild-ass guess that the reason Liz was such a wretched student is that her first teacher was a shrill and easily-overwhelmed incompetent who, for some reason or another, had it in for her. If she'd had any other teacher but that moron Blais, Liz might have been a more enthusiastic student as a child and wouldn't have matured to become the incompetent buffoon that Lynn thinks that a good teacher is.

The reason that I mention this has something to do with the comic strip "Luann" by Greg and Karen Evans. As I mentioned before, the celebration of designated heroes and villains started out as a spin-off from an earlier strip about an inept, bitter time-server of a teacher named Fogarty. While failed English teacher Evans clearly seems to think of the man as a sympathetic character and a role model, the truth is that the man is the disturbed and disturbing proof of how having the wrong man in the wrong place can kill any sort of interest in education. A clueless, pompous and boorish whiner like him frothing with outrage because the world is passing him by without his approval can't help but discourage at least one of his charges and make getting educated seem like too much trouble.

This is why it sort of bothers me that Lynn has clearly reverse-engineered the stupid sack of bastard and called him Mr Warren. We start off with his practically soiling himself because he thinks that Mike and his friends are going to form a gang, he makes a cutting remark when Mike isn't feeling well and he all but shits himself when it looks as if the blizzard of 88 is going to make him stay with the horrible sub-creatures they don't pay him enough to deal with. As it was with The Idiot Goddess Of Public Shaming and Lizzie, Mike learns nothing much from this moron that isn't "grown-ups like your teacher and your parents are miserable all the time because when you turn twenty, they remove the part of you that enjoys life and in revenge, they want to get you to start hating getting up in the morning and regretting still being alive early."

As we all know, Jan Eliot of Stone Soup tells people that Lynn is one of her heroes and biggest influences. I can believe that because of the habit her author avatar Val has of using the logical fallacy of appealing to shame when silencing Holly when she says things that make Mommy uncomfortable and the fact that like the Pattersons, the Stones make that ridiculous palms-out-pleading gesture that looks so God-damned foolish and fake, it hurts to see it. That being said, Val Stone is no Elly Patterson to be filled with self-pity and a need to avenge herself on her children despite what Holly might say about the matter. Given that her primary goal in life is to save her daughters from threats that don't actually exist, Val actually is is a thirty-something white version of Delta James from the comic strip "Luann". This is because when Elly "volunteers" her children's free time without their consent, it's basically to get them out of her hair and punish them for what she sees as an act of defiance. When Val does it, she joins Delta Do-Gooder in assuming that the lucky beneficiaries of her acts of manipulation and coercion might complain at first but will benefit from being saved from themselves. This is because she joins Delta in being the child of a marriage between idealism and ignorance. The teenaged girl doesn't get that when she leaves high school and enters the real world, she's just going to be a face in the crowd instead of the commanding figure she is now. As for Val, she seems to be blissfully unaware that hectoring her child about homework and media imagery is rather futile because she can't possibly be the only influence in Holly's life. Also, both of them tend to tune out any silly noise the people they're trying to rescue make about how they don't actually know what they're talking about.

The odd thing about having the third generation being exposed to the paranoia, rage and entitlement of the second is that people would foolishly expect better of Lizardbreath because she's a teacher. It would amaze them that someone whose job it is to deal with kids would do the same sort of crappy job of it that Elly does. What they would forget is that Liz is a teacher in a comic strip. It seems to me that the best example of what a teacher in a comic strip is is either Mr Fogarty or Miss Phelps from the Comic Strip "Luann". Given that Fogarty is a tweedy, balding, humorless, clueless and unsympathetic drone with glasses that turn his eyes into blank discs and since Miss Phelps looks like a man in a bad wig and an outfit that is mostly seen on maiden aunts when they take their final star turn at the local mortuary, I think we can say certain things about them.

First off, their baffled and barely suppressed rage when confronted with the fact that art, cinema, popular culture, technology, history, geography and social norms didn't obligingly come to a dead stop when they were given their teaching degrees tells us that we're dealing with pissants who don't want things to change so that they can still know everything.

The secondary qualification is a total lack of sympathy for their charges because the Luanns of the world don't see the point of learning obsolete knowledge from a droning fool who has made a pagan idol of whatever mush was pounded into him at Teacher's College. To a Fogarty, not knowing the grab-bag of factoids he mistakes for the wisdom of the ages must mean not that he's an imbecile stereotype puking forth bullcrap he's too gullible and timid to question but that the no-good kids don't know what's good for them.

The end result is that we're dealing with two tweedy throwbacks instilling a hatred of learning because they don't know anything useful and hate the children who remind them of that. Given that Liz is the same sort of mushhead and has the same lack of sympathy for people who get in her way and question her alleged knowledge of the world, she's walking down the same ruinous path to irrelevance and failure as a teacher. This means that she's more than capable of thundering on about how children must be lying when they say that they didn't mean to do wrong.

The sad thing is that unlike doctors and dentists, we cannot sue teachers for malpractice. Were tenure to be overridden by legal action, the Fogarties and Phelpses and Lizardbreaths of the world would be denied the chance to witlessly and smugly snuff out the light of knowledge and possibly be given a new better role when they were processed into animal feed.

If a comic strip runs long enough, there will always come a story line that reveals a decline in quality of not only the writing but also the artist’s dedication to his or her craft. Examples of this sinister climacteric are:

• The over-reliance Schulz developed on plotlines that involved Woodstock and Snoopy’s freakish siblings.
• The “Coming after” that Liz Patterson of the Foobiverse endured.
• Batiuk’s ineptly researched “Homecoming of Wally Winkerbean” glurgefest and insult to every serviceman or woman who ever lived or ever will.
• Billingsley’s plodding refusal to stop reminding us that bullying is wrong, second-hand smoke is an evil and that people need to pay attention in school.

Now, Greg Evans can join the roster of epic failure with the “Return of Dirk” plotline. It started off bad when the De Groots ran around like chickens with their heads cut off because they were too ignorant, fearful and stupid to contact the police; since they're too damned stupid to realize that Luann probably has anemia, we can't expect miracles from them. It got worse in a frightful hurry, though. That's because The Grin That Walks has decided to fix things with a scheme that would work fine in a sitcom but have horrific potential consequences in the real world; said clever plan (which Brad will follow despite knowing it won't work) is to have Luann's enemy Tiffany tell Dirk that Toni doesn't live where she really lives. Since TJ can always convince Brad to go along with something stupid despite always leaving him holding the bag, we're in for a somewhat more horrific version of the Coming After. What thus started out as mere idiocy has escalated to criminal recklessness, a recklessness made worse because Tiff might decide that Luann would be a better stooge than she is.  It doesn’t matter what the outcome is any more; Evans has declared creative and moral bankruptcy.

The real reason that Curtis never seems to learn from the past, of course, is that he's always going to be eleven years old. He's been eleven since 1988 and he'll still be eleven when Billingsley retires and either hands the strip off to an assistant or writes a strip of destiny. Since he has to be the local representative of the "This Loser Is You" franchise, he has to forget any lessons he might learn so that his failings might move the strip forward. The problem, of course, is that every so often, Billingsley introduces a story element that makes it difficult to believe that we're still frozen in some sort of late eighties-early nineties fantasy world; the most problematic element is Greg's disdain for rap and love of R and B. Since he's still in his late forties, it would make more sense if he were to start to tell Curtis to listen to real rappers instead of the lesser lights that dominate the charts.

The problems in chronology aren't as bad when you get to a strip wherein characters age; as an example, Luann DeGroot can remember things and refer to the past without introducing the sort of absurdities one would have to deal with in other strips. The problem with her universe is that characters age at varying rates to meet whatever need Evans has at any given time. This means that Luann is eventually going to end up being classmates with Toni's niece/cousin/daughter/whatever Shannon.

It's far easier for moral lessons to stick in strips wherein people age in real time; the characters in For Better or For Worse can pretty much pinpoint when John figured out that Elly wasn't simply talking to hear herself talk when she described how overwhelmed she felt. The trouble, of course, is that since the Pattersons can not admit to making mistakes, they miss the point of what happened to them and end up getting all their lessons wrong.

The real problem I have with the strip Luann is that her storyline isn't as central as it once was; ever since Brad joined the fire department, lost his pudge and gained about sixty IQ points, it's as if he's closer to being the lead character than she is. An example of this trend is that his supporting characters bring more to the party than hers do. We know that all Tiffany has to cling to are her illusions, we know that Bernice is lashing out because she feels unlovable, we know that Delta thinks that she's got to make the most of life because she knows how fleeting it is, we know that Gunther is a penis behind glass and we know that Luann's potential is more or less going to waste because her parents are too lazy, stupid and useless to engage her. Brad is the cast member with the most unknowns in his life to deal with so he's more compelling. Asking the questions "Will Toni get over her problems with commitment?", "How is the annoying little child that appears from time to time really related to her?", "What is the deal with TJ anyway?" and "Is Dirk really gone or what?" keep me coming back; the questions "How long will it take before the latest ersatz Aaron Hill leaves the strip and how big of an idiot will Luann make herself look making it up to her eunuchy future husband this time?", "Is Perky Goth Crystal slumming by hanging out with Tiff", "Will Knute ever open his damned eyes?" and "Is the midget who thinks he's Elvis rich or what?" do not.

As we've seen, the authority figure with whom Luann butts heads most often is her homeroom teacher, Mister Fogarty. The reason is that she doesn't quite get why he has no other life than teaching High School English; she can see Ms Phelps making a play for someone who's alive from the neck down but not a literal-minded robot who had his libido and personality removed so he could store more trivia in his brain. Does it matter that most of his knowledge is obsolete and has been since the Soviets launched Sputnik? Not at all; since he's an imbecile whose only talent is passing and marking tests, he'll plod along doing the same useless thing he's been doing since he got his B.Ed. Since she's alive and capable of thinking and feeling, she can't help but get into trouble with someone who's on his way to becoming a machine. Why I find this interesting is that Evans started out making Fogarty the focus of a strip; his shtick was that he was the same dull, boring, unsympathetic, God-awful drone trying his damnedest to teach his mush to unwilling students who doubted its usefulness.

There's an annoyance that's plagued the strip a lot longer than Frank and Nancy's inability to see the threat that Dirk the Jerk represents: their inability to figure out who their children's friends are. It's not bad enough that they can't seem to see that Bernice lives to berate Luann or that Delta is trying to stiff-arm Death; what really irritates is their lack of curiosity about Brad's friend T.J. In a normal family where the parents are not imbeciles, Mom and Dad tend to like to know for certain who their kids hang out with; the DeGroots, on the other hand, are content to believe the contradictory stories that TJ tells them. Is he a male model? A con man cowering behind dimwit suburbanites? A rich jerk getting his rocks off manipulating a family of pasty-faced clods? I don't know for sure but I'd like to; that makes me a smarter person than anyone named DeGroot.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind us all of a device that a lot of comic strip authors love to use: the lazy child who won't clean up after him- or herself. It would probably be easier to list the number of children who do pick up after themselves than it would the crowds who do not. The reason that this is such a common device is that it allows the author to express their frustration with a target they find acceptable: the soft, coddled, entitled and defiant North American teenager. The reason that Luann is such a creature is not, as Evans might think, because she's inherently lazy. The reason is hidden in her declaration that she cannot see herself as becoming like the bland, officious, dreary time-server she calls a guidance counselor. This, along with her breezy statement that Miss Phelps was born a forty-something killjoy, is a lie. Deep down, Luann can see herself mutating into that and it scares her; since she's fairly young and sheltered, she can't see past surface impressions or through defense mechanisms so doesn't know that a person she's blithely dismissing as a humorless drudge who was born old might be quite a different person outside the artificial environment of a North American high school. For instance, the woman has in Mr Fogarty her own personal Aaron Hill; Luann might not get it but then she probably doesn't quite get that the man wasn't always bald and tweedy. Instead, she tells herself horror stories about jettisoning all the parts of herself that might make her appealing to boys and chanting slogans at the children of 2040.

It seems only appropriate to continue my look at the characters of Luann by discuss her frienemy Bernice; the purpose she seems to serve in strip is to make unsubtle comments about how lazy, stupid and selfish Luann is. Since Luann is sort of used to being underestimated, that isn't the same sort of problem it would be for more insecure people. What does seem to bother her is how needy her friend can be. It seems to me that we're looking at a larval version of Connie Poirier here; she's so blasted clingy and self-loathing, she angrily accused her former boyfriend of infidelity because he didn't want to get engaged and broke things off on the spot. That would be bad enough if they were adults; since this happened after midterms in their sophomore year, it's a damned sight worse. This tells me that Luann endures this person not only because they've been friends since pre-school or because her out-of-touch parents think Bernice is a good influence; I think that she doesn't want to set off the human bomb with the granny glasses.