Every so often, it occurs to me that it's probably for the best that Lynn doesn't want to speculate as to what's been happening to her characters in the ten and a half years since we last saw them. This is because it seems highly likely that Elly is dealing with a rather tragic dramatic irony that no doubt is perceived as a cruel trick played upon ( Read more... )

As we all know, we're about six months away from John taking a really keen interest in model trains. The way this habit was introduced is that we have the man standing around moping as if the Sun were about to die because (cue horror music sting), he'd turned forty that year and was too young to be that old. That pissed me off no end because six ( Read more... )

It would seem that Lynn has an ex to grind and bury in the backs of the hotel industry owing to how she makes John look as if he's going to be a threat to Elly's person. Next Wednesday's strip just flat out says that Elly half-way expects to get her ass kicked for getting his car smashed and we have to make him angry at something to make that valid ( Read more... )

One of the more irritating parts of the stupid, stupid hormone attack arc is that Gordon wants very much to break out in zits like normal people instead of having an epileptic seizure every time he gets an erection because his nitwit creator is too damned shy to ask people what one feels like and also thinks that since she has the best brain, her ( Read more... )

The very odd thing about Mike's entry into the teenaged years is that the older he gets, the more docile he becomes. When you contrast the violent hellion of the Early Years with the boorish couch potato telling himself that Martha sure will be sorry that she put some space between her and a pliable dolt who doesn't realize that Elly threw a monkey ( Read more... )

Another part of John's problem is that he doesn't understand for the life of him that what people intend to do when they do something doesn't matter in the least. This blindness to the reality of what the effects of an action are and how they're being perceived as being the only things that can count is why his belief that Elly needs to be somehow ( Read more... )

The interesting thing about Martha is that when we finally get to see her family, they're presented as being an unpalatable horde of freaks. Mr McRae is a fool-hardy and chauvinistic jerk who doesn't listen to his wife, Mrs McRae is a shrew, older brother Stan is a snotty and boorish jerk who insults Mike and Martha herself is a passive little ( Read more... )

Of course, the same sort of noise and blame evasion that would have to take place if Elly were to, say, chaperone Mike for a pee-wee hockey tournament would also take place if she were, as howtheduck and aprilp_katje proposed, to be forced to accompany Mike and Lizzie to Kamp Kawkawa. In fact, I should think that we'd be getting a little more noise out of her ( Read more... )

As we know, Lynn used the messed-up camping trip John and Phil went on as a boundary separating the Early and Middle Years of her strip owing to the fact that shortly afterward, Lizzie started attending elementary school. Personally, I think that John and Elly probably justify using September 1986 as a dividing line because they went from a 'young ( Read more... )

As we know, Lynn has programmed Elly with her values....the chiefest of which is that weighing more than some arbitrary standard makes you ugly and thus unworthy of love and attention. She'll deny it to the end but the belief that anyone not 'perfect' should just settle for a lonely and unhappy life of isolation and the contempt of their betters is ( Read more... )