Anthony, Liz Kiss: Fans Recoil in Horror

With a wedding kiss played as romantically as she can manage it, it looks as if Lynn Johnston at For Better or For Worse is moving towards pairing elder Patterson daughter Elizabeth off with grade-school sweetheart Anthony. (There could be a reversal, which would be awesome.) This follows a courting period that included an awful-looking mustache, shared testimony at an attempted rape trial (one of my personal go-to moves), creepy and not-reciprocated thought-balloons, a creepier fenced-in basement play area, lots of hectoring comments from Mom and Dad, and every other guy in Liz's life being revealed horror-movie style as suddenly unworthy of her. Comics Curmudgeon likely has the funniest commentary and best reader responses. This person recaps Shaenon Garrity's hilarious jeremiad on the subject.

It's not really typical for so many people to comment on a plot point within a strip, at least not since my Aunt Barbara was reading Terry and the Pirates the way that kids now watch Guiding Light. For that reason and many others, I think this is an interesting subject. One, it marks a probable resolution in the final major lingering plotline question in the long-running For Better or For Worse before it ends its real-time run and turns into a trapped in amber framing sequence/old strips hybrid. Two, it shows that people can become deeply involved with the outcome of a strip storyline and that this can be fostered by a place to go to complain (the Internet). Three, I think through its contrasting elements it says something about the kind of fan entitlement-flavored protests that pop up in comics like so many broken bed springs in a cartoon featuring hillbillies.

Where the Anthony/Elizabeth issue feels different than a lot of recent comic book protests is that the people trashing this now-likely plot development are doing so as criticism, not as a demand it be changed back to suit them. Additionally, the criticism here speaks to the specific artistic outlook of one creator rather than some temporary variations and sales stunts masterminded by a feature's 67th writer. I think the criticism is kind of poignant, too, that Lynn Johnston seems to prefer an outcome for young people where they stay close to home and marry a safe, dependable person with whom they're familiar and whose best point may be the proximity of their seventh grade locker to their own. So one child moves into the old home, one child marries the boy she first kissed (I'm guessing there), in slightly improbable, seemingly forced fashion. It's not exactly the life that many readers of their same age imagined for themselves, and thus the scorn. That seems to me a different set of issues than someone not getting Spider-Man exactly right.

The other thing worth noting is that if this is the direction she's going, than we could be very near the feature's end in terms of plot movement, if not actual strips.
 
posted 3:14 am PST | Permalink
 

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