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

[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.

[howtheduck]

The very next strip that appeared was the one where Elly calls her mommy and says, "I had an awful night with the kids, Mom. I was up every half hour! --Yeah, first one, then the other.

This wasn't the strip for Tuesday, but the strip with Mike yelling about bedtime does fit as a description for this one to follow it, or any other bedtime-related reprints she can find.

[aprilp_katje]

This wasn't the strip for Tuesday, but the strip with Mike yelling about bedtime does fit as a description for this one to follow it, or any other bedtime-related reprints she can find.

Good point. With that reordering, LJ can pretend establish that Saturday's, yesterday's, and today's strips all took place in one night; then tomorrow Elly can be whining to her mommy about the bad night. Then maybe Thursday/Friday/Saturday as new-runs, or maybe she'll have fewer new-runs with other reordered reruns inserted.

[forworse]

I'll bet that tomorrow's strip is a bit further on in the collection (p. 95), where Elly tells Annie that she's bored with her life and Annie tells Elly to have another baby. Then we can see the early introduction of April.

[aprilp_katje]

LOL--of course, she'd be committing herself to new-runs and redraws for the next 28 years to keep adjusting for that adjustment. ;)