FBoFW--what might be to come, week of 2/16/2009

[aprilp_katje]

Today (Monday, 2/16/2009) we had a reprint strip where Liz is awake and crying in the middle of the night and Elly cannot figure out why. For those interested, I'll post what happens in the next couple of strips in the original run, behind the cut.

Comments

[dreadedcandiru2]

"Your mom must have WANTED a large family, Connie." Then in the last panel, Lawrence and Michael have come close to hear Connie say, "--Not exactly, I was my father's last try for a boy."

I remember what Beth did with that fact: turned it into Connie's motive for rebellion. We had the idiot stereotype French Canadian heavy father who vanished from the landscape pretty much around the same time that arrogant jackass De Gaulle was publicly stabbing a World War II ally who'd saved his country's ass twice within the space of thirty years in the back ranting about how it was his wife's fault that he couldn't produce the son he wanted. Connie finds the straight dope in a medical textbook and her imbecile stereotype mother orders her to not shame her papa by telling him his sperm has a distinct deficiency of Y chromosomes. Simmering under the mental restrictions of an obscurantist pinhead holdover from the days of La Grande Noirceur (The Great Darkness -- the term in office of Premier Duplessis) and his refusal to show her the least bit of affection turned her into the mental case we see today.

[aprilp_katje]

Ugh, I hate what Beth did with that one strip in terms of backstory. Everything is melodrama with her--melodrama with autocratic papas and senseless misery. She even felt the need to create the detail that Connie's mother was wife #2--something the strips never so much as hinted at.

I think just about everyone has known of a family with a large number of children who are all the same gender, where the parents were trying to have one of the other gender until they reached a point where they didn't want to have more children. It's not a great story in and of itself, but it doesn't need the embellishments that were foisted upon Connie's liography.

[dreadedcandiru2]

No, it does not. All that needed to be said was that she was the youngest of six.

[forworse]

I know that somewhere on the internet is a random phrase generator to produce management-speak. I am beginning to suspect that someplace else is a random liography generator where the various elements which make up the backstory of a FOOBian can be mixed for Beth's latest victim.

[I can't recall whether LJ has already reprinted that one.]

It's made even more difficult by the echo strips. Like Lizzie getting Farley's hair on her hands -- I'll have to re-check Growing Like a Weed or Starting from Scratch, but I'm sure the final panel was originally April and Farley or April and Edgar.

[forworse]

** answers own question **

P. 94 of There Goes My Baby! has Liz painting her fingernails and toenails as Farley snoozes on the floor next to her bed. He wakes, yawns, and shakes himself, leaving Liz's nails clogged with his dog hair.

Starting from Scratch p. 25 has John grilling steaks on the BBQ as Elly brushes Farley upwind, and all his hair winds up all over the steaks.

Starting from Scratch p. 114 -- yup, the same collection -- has a long Sunday strip about April washing her hands and, being unable to find a towel, dries them on Farley and comes to the dinner table with dog hair stuck to her fingers.

Lynn has been into recycling for ages!

[aprilp_katje]

[goes to collections; wastes an hour!]

Ugh, LJ sure does like the dog-hair gags.

Going through Starting From Scratch--it always startles me how much Rhetta's hairdo reminds me of teen!April's hair.

Also, got aggravated about the whole "vegetarian" arc all over again. John and Liz really never gave it a chance; Elly only ever viewed it as a "diet" and was eager for an excuse to "cheat."

I have to stop myself from re-reading the April-in-the-ravine/Farley-death sequence; am shutting the book upon Mike returning to school from March break.