The Grampa Jim Thing.

[mrissa]

So here's the thing, Lynn Johnston: if you are doing your long-running family comic strip right, you don't have to do a bunch of "Grandpa in the old days" strips to make your readers go, "Hey, that's right! We liked that character!" before you kill him off. They already like him. It's one of the benefits of a long-running family comic.

And if you're doing it right, you don't have to use cliffhanger endings that will undermine all future strips, because now who's going to believe it when the grandfather character in FBoFW actually does die? Or when anything else at all happens? You've given him the cliffhanger death-like thing that turned out to be a non-fatal stroke twice now. Not acceptable. Nor does it increase tension. It makes people roll their eyes. Can you think of a moment where pathos has been increased by some dork jumping in front of the difficult scene and shouting, "Psyyyyyych! I bet you thought he was dead, huh? He's not dead! But I bet you thought he was! Got you good that time, huh? When you thought he was dead? But he wasn't!"? No. And there's a reason for that.

And if you're doing it right, holding a mirror up to the concerns of the time doesn't feel like cheap manipulation. A lot of Baby Boomers are dealing with their parents' aging right now; a lot of people my age are dealing with their grandparents' failing health. (And we know we're the lucky ones, to have kept them this long.) You can't use that as a shortcut to emotional involvement. If you're going to make people relive some of the most difficult moments and decisions in their lives on the "funny pages," you have to realize that if you don't do a truly excellent job, you're just grinding our noses into our griefs and fears for nothing. There are a lot of people for whom this scenario is their life right now. Wondering whether their loved one was going to make it. Wondering whether they were making the right choices in end-of-life medical care. Wondering when those choices were going to just evaporate, leaving them with no choices at all. That situation is plenty dramatic if you deal with it honestly. Cheap parlor tricks don't enhance it. It doesn't need enhancement.

You're not doing it right. This is something it's important to do right, and you're not. Bad art matters. Bad art makes a difference. You took a series of risks, and you screwed up each of them, taking you farther and farther away from the point where this might have worked. And now here you are trying to deal with something major, and you've whined and cheated your characters into cardboard cutouts, so you can't trust that anyone will care about them any more, so you fall back on the old retracting stage knife gag, which has never once in the history of its existence wrung emotional investment from an audience. You've lost us. I don't think you'll get us back again. Go make some cheap puns on the dogs' names or jokes about how people get wrinkles as they get older. It's the level you've earned.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am generally a patient person, but I have my limits.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Indeed!

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I was just grumping in james_nicoll's LJ about this very thing. Been there, done that, don't need it in the funny papers...

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The one way it would work for me (I hate to say it becaue I do love Grandpa Jim) is if this *is* a fatal stroke, just not an instantly fatal one. If he dies over the next few days or a week. And even so, it should have been clear in the first strip that he wasn't dead.

I haven't been following Funky Winkerbean (though I just went and read the last month) so I don't know whether everyone knew well in advance that Lisa would die this week. Apparently comic artists work six weeks ahead, so it's possibly the timing was accidental. If not, she should be ashamed of that too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't read Funky Winkerbean, either.

But yah -- it should have been clear in the first strip that he wasn't dead. That's a deal-breaker for me. Even if he's currently dying but lingers awhile, that was not an okay way to start it.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The more I think of it, the more I think more slamming is needed. You know, I lost two grandmothers-in-law within three months this year. And though I miss them and I hate seeing what it did to my parents-in-law, in a way it was fair. It was what's supposed to happen, you get old and eventually you die. Generally real people give some warning beforehand by being ill for a while as my GM-I-Ls did, but even in the case of sudden or accidental deaths, there's that wanring they have you with the birth certificate, the one that says you WILL die someday. We have been warned.

Jim Richards, being constructed of ink instead of flesh, didn't have to die. More than that we had a promise from the God of his universe that he *wouldn't* die; Lynn explicitly said one reason for freezing the strip was so she didn't have to deal with that. Now one of two things will happen: he will die, unfairly, or he will survive with even more damage, frozen in a fate that seemsalmost worse. There are some ways in which an author is required to play fair and this is one. Bad Art, indeed.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

We knew it was close, but I didn't know until this week that it would be today that Lisa died on Funky.

I think FBoFW jumped the shark.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I heard last week that Batiuk spoiled what day he was going to kill Lisa off on as being today.

[apologyhat.livejournal.com]

Tuesday's comic was cheap; usually LJ doesn't do that kind of cliff-hanger, and I was pretty disappointed.

One thing that bugs me about this whole storyline is how emotionally false it rings. If you want to bring in a serious issue about our aging parents/grandparents, fine, then do that. Don't milk it for cheap drama, than shove it conveniently off-stage where Jim luckily and amazingly has a full-time, free caregiver who loves what she does. Show Elly struggling to care for her dad. How about this summer, when Mike was freelancing and making his own schedule, and Liz was not working--why couldn't we have seen them helping out? Be realistic about it; I know that in a lot of these cases, the spouse DOES take on the bulk of the caregiving. But from my experience, it's the children who are hugely involved.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Or if the children aren't hugely involved, it's hard on the spouse, and there's stress on the family. Sometimes there are times -- like when Mike was freelancing and making his own schedule -- when it might look to someone else like you had plenty of time because they weren't aware of the time commitments you had if they weren't schedule commitments. Other times people can use that kind of thing as an excuse. People within the same family often have different ideas about how feasible it is to have small children around sick old folks. Etc.

And someone who's made a point of handling things that are "hard to handle in comics" could certainly make a stab at that kind of thing.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Oh, snap!

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Well said. In fact, of all the complaints I've read about the strip (not just this episode, the strip overall), this is the best.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I am totally applauding this rant. Beautiful and brilliant and calls the whole thing.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I never got into For Better or For Worse, and when I read recent criticisms of the strip, I feel both regretful and glad of this fact. Regretful, because it's clearly something that has attracted a great many articulate and engaged readers. Glad because it seems to be in the process of letting those readers down in nearly every way possible.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

YES!

do you read the Comics Curmudgeon?

and i do read Funky Winkerbean, and i thought that they were getting into some kind of comic artists' bitch fight. it was kind of funny, in a sick way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do read Comics Curmudgeon. Yes.

C.C.

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= You do? I did not know that. So, who are you there? :-)

Re: C.C.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't say I comment. If I am anyone anywhere, I am Mris or Mrissa or Marissa Lingen there. I am rarely sneaky.

Or else I am so super-sneaky that I don't have to be the obvious level of sneaky because I'm just that sneaky!

Or something.

Re: C.C.

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= Well, it's just nice to know that I'm not amongst total strangers. I still haven't met any 'mudges face to face. You, at least I've seen JPEGs.

Re: C.C.

[apologyhat.livejournal.com]

I post there, too, under the name Cedar. For the most part, I prefer the livejournals for discussing comics, which I feel have real discussion and back-and-forth conversations. CC is funny and all, but the comments just seen to be non-stop one-up-man-ships to see who can be more outrageous, or who can throw out the weirdest reference.

Re: C.C.

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= I admit I skim many of the comments (I do believe I've enjoyed and replied to yours). I think Josh sets a good tone, and there are clever and and funny commenters, too, though like most fora you have to wade through lots of less-inspired stuff.

To return to the titular topic: in today's strip we find that Grampa Jim's stroke is part of an ongoing campaign to convince that, no, really, Liz and Anthony belong together. Arrgh!

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

After further consideration...

I wouldn't be at all surprised if she is setting up a bar brawl between some members of the family who want to keep him "alive" by any possible means, and others who want to let this servant depart in peace.

And no, I don't look forward to a doctrine war on my comic page.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I wondered about that, but I highly doubt LJ has that kind of depth to her. I'm sure she'd be on the "string him along at all costs" side anyway, and we all know that whatever Elly thinks is right...

I'm surprised she even put that comment in from Iris at all.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

No, it shows how worthless and weak Iris is to even consider such a thing! After all, Iris is a Second Love, and as Elly, Michael and now, tragically, Elizabeth have been forced by their puppeteer, only a First Love is the True Love. Anyone else is a Johnny/Janey-Come-Lately who'll inevitably cheat and/or pull the plug on you!

I agree with Kizmet_42. FBOFW has jumped the shark, which is too bad because she'd done some awesome things, like Lawrence's coming out and Farley's death (which admittedly was overly sentimentalized, but if you can't get sentimental over a pet's death . . .).

[apologyhat.livejournal.com]

When did it jump the shark, in your opinion? I think Meredith's birth was the start of it going downhill, although I still read and enjoyed the strip after that. Robin's birth and Lizzie's near-rape were other huge, huge mistakes that changed the way I read the strip. But it didn't get REALLY awful until Mike's book took center stage, and Liz left Mtig.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people would agree with you (the sexual assault story would have been a good and important one if LJ didn't cheapen it into merely another vehicle to throw Liz and Anthony together). But it was Liz leaving Mtigwaki and specifically the Officer Wright/All Second Loves Are Cheaters Reprise that pushed me over the edge.

I still read the strip every day, but it's more in the nature of visiting someone in the Home after they've lost their marbles. I remember who they were, and it's sad, but it would be sadder still, somehow, to abandon them.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I never could read FBoFW, but I've watched people use it as the archetype of the bad not-funny comic strip forever. I'm a little surprised to find people I know and like were following it with enjoyment until recently. Not as surprised as I'd have been if I *had* read it and decided myself that it wasn't any good, but still surprised; I had thought there was a general consensus against it, and apparently there was not.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

It's started to really, really stink in the last 3 years or so. Before it was more of a pleasant soap opera rather than a funny-ha-ha strip. Now it makes you want to dig out your own eyes with a spork.

No, I don't know why I still sometimes read it.

[steve-dash-o.livejournal.com]

I'm not a FWFW reader either, and I have no idea whether this will match your sense of humor, M'ris, but my roommate is a longtime reader of the strip and did a parody a few months ago in his webcomic: http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20070711.html

It got mixed reactions from other FBFW readers, but it seemed like a lot of them appreciated it.

[loup_noir]

I can't believe I'm wading in to defend a comic strip....

The thing is that people do have multiple strokes and I thought this particular strip was very moving in that Iris is questioning whether Jim's return would be the best for him or not. People have those thoughts all the time, but very few will actually voice them.

Lynn Johnston, in my middle-aged opinion, is a very brave storyteller. People die, beloved pets die, people age and get chubby, things do not work out right all the time, marriages come undone, people's luck may not be what it seems. If she failed you, she did not fail me, nor has she failed me in the forever time I've been reading her strip. So, clearly YMMV.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Still, she could have done all that and done it without the cheap (second time!) cliffhanger ending. All she needed to do was start the that strip a panel later, and, for instance, end it by showing Jim with EMTs working on him.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

It's not that she's addressing the tough issues--she's addressed them before. I feel the cheap cliff-hanger ending to the previous strip is the thing that cheapens the experience. (And it's the second time she's done it....the first time I let her get away with, because surely that stab of panic is what the characters would feel. But revisiting it almost exactly suggests that she can't think of a new way to portray the multiple strokes.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

As other people have said: it's not that Grampa Jim had multiple strokes. It's that she did the "it looks like he's dead/no wait, he's not" thing for the second time. Having Iris question whether Jim's return would be the best for him would have been an interesting and moving question if it had not followed immediately on the heels of the kind of gimmicky trick of the previous day.

Handling tough issues does not, by itself, make a person a good artist. Being brave is necessary. But it's not sufficient. And it's pretty important to stick the landing.

[loup_noir]

Okay. Whatever. Still, the woman's been doing this for decades and, if she resorts to a similar ending once or twice, it's not going to put me into a snit. There are very few series of any sort that don't have this sort of bump occasionally.

It doesn't bother me. I'll still read the strip. In fact, it's my one of my favorites, right up there with Girl Genius.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Plus you'll notice today (Friday) that she dropped that plot thread idea in favor of having Liz and April fight over a vanished harmonica instead. I don't think LJ has the nerve to advocate for voluntary euthanasia.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know that it's dropped yet; we'll see. For the moment it certainly is. The fighting over the harmonica thing actually seemed pretty reasonable to me: it's the kind of disagreement some family members have under stress, when they can't scream, "I don't want Grandpa to die I don't want any of you to die this sucks this sucks this sucks why is the universe not conforming to my utterly reasonable wishes RIGHT NOW?"

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear!

I'd just about stopped reading the hybrid strip but happened to see yesterdays, and I was really curious to see how they'd handle his death....but no, once again he's not dead. What drives me insane is how she keeps revisiting the issues instead of closing off the story arcs. She had two boyfriend-cheats-on-Liz arcs, and now she has two stroke story arcs that read as the exact same thing. Just rehashed and reused, and I feel like I've read this, why would I need to read it again.

I don't trust Lynn's story anymore. She broke it for me.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I hear that "broken" bit. It's just sad.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

She's still telling a story about how it is to fail with age, dealing with someone not being able to do the things they used to do, and not being as much in there as you have come to expect them to be.

It's just one level up; it's not about the characters anymore, but the cartoonist.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I have no intelligent contribution, but I must say: oh my goodness, I love that icon.

What realy hurts....

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is that, whatever happens, the Core Four (Elly, John, Liz and Mike) will still be inconsiderate fools. None of them accept blame or criticism because they'r just too big for that.

Re: What realy hurts....

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. One of my main complaints over the last several years has been that Johnston has been unwilling to let her main characters just be wrong.

Re: What realy hurts....

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

That stems from her own failure to take responsibility for her failings, I'd say.

Re: What realy hurts....

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know her personally, so I can't say. As a writer myself, I'd prefer to steer clear of trying to make personal judgments. But if that's true, it's certainly unfortunate.

Re: What realy hurts....

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

I don't really know her either but a lot of what she says and does certainly seems to indicate a lack of empathy for those around her. You'll notice that when someone tries to share his or her feelings, you end up with a smack-down from someone who doesn't want to share the other person's pain.

Re: What realy hurts....

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

Well, except when it comes to dating someone who wasn't your childhood sweetheart. Then they're WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Re: C.C.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, but "wrong" is different from "WRONG WRONG WRONG." Ever have a friend or SO with severe self-flagellation problems? You can't say, "It bothers me that you were at least half an hour late for our last several dinners," because you get the, "I know, I am an inconsiderate CAD and I don't DESERVE TO LIVE and I don't blame you if you NEVER WANT TO SEE ME AGAIN," response. There is no external criticism possible because the self-criticism is so extreme that it trumps actual reasonable criticism.

You know what really bothers me about the Liz/Anthony storyline? ("Everything?" Well, yes. But more specifically.) Liz wasn't allowed to hang out with Anthony and decide that he was a better fit for her than Paul and have to break up with Paul. Sometimes adults have to break up because they are a poor fit for each other as long-term partners, not because one of them has Done Dirt to the other. The conversation that starts, "You're a really great guy, and I really like you, but..." is hard. It's no fun for anyone involved. But it's better than having all of your decisions made for you by the Authorial Hand. Liz couldn't just decide that she was better off with Anthony. The Universe had to Conspire to Push Her Into His Arms. Bleh.

Re: What realy hurts....

[apologyhat.livejournal.com]

I agree--compare the Eric-is-a-cheating arc with the Paul-is-a-cheater arc. In the first one, Eric was certainly the villain, but Liz behaved poorly as well--she acted needy, desperate and insecure; she ignored all the warning signs; she didn't listen to her concerned friends; she allowed herself to be totally suckered. She didn't come off as completely right in the situation. But with Paul, five to six years later, it was all about poor Liz the innocent victim. She never expected this to happen; there were no warning signs; Paul was a scoundrel and a liar. Whathisface the principal said something to her, but for the most part, she was completely free of blame. That difference mark such a huge change in the strip for me.