In Michigan we called them “Canada Pants” because girls would wear them to go to Canadian bars.

Heh…. “Canada Pants”

This impression is literally confirmed in the cover of an old FBOFW collection, the one with the artist’s face filling the Pattersons’ living room, the whole family looking scared s#@tless at this giant stranger poking her face into their world.

Then there’s the old dead-dog plotline; the random bloody beating of the landlady (I loved opening the comics page in the morning to an old lady face-down in a pool of her own blood), April’s wholly unredeeming character for most of her life in the strip (in any other strip she’d be the horrible self-centered neighbor’s kid, not one of the heroines), and this latest plotline with Liz getting stalked and sexually attacked (another great bit to see first thing in the morning). For all the care lavished on the “growing-up” and aging of the whole family, there’s no more ambiguity in the Pattersons’ world than in Middle-Earth–and the bad people are as obvious from their appearance as Peter Jackson’s Orcs.
Sorry, everyone. Clearly I’ve thought far too much about this, and maybe I’ve just tuned into FBOFW at the wrong times, but I never saw a whole forum devoted to it, and when I started writing I realized how tired I was of feeling compelled to read FBOFW with its addictive plotlines, then getting sucked into its inexorable victimization of its protagonists. Now, reading other postings, I find the strip’s coming to an end, which I suppose means we’ll be treated to as nasty and stomach-churning an Anthony-Terese divorce as has ever made it into the funny pages. Whee! It’s enough to make a person nostalgic for Felix the Cat.