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For Better Or For Worse, 3/10/05

Jeez, April, make your mind! First you’re horrified by and judgmental of Becky’s slutty, slutty ways, then you’re boasting to your older brother about the fact that you woo men into naughty thoughts with your hot, just-barely-post-pubescent bod. It’s wrong on so very many levels.

According to the official FBOFW Website, April was introduced into the strip when Lynn Johnston had yearnings to have another kid. I guess it’s a sort of artistic integrity to have her wish-fulfillment creation become the most difficult of the bunch to manage and keep out of the free clinic. (Though I guess they’re all free in Canada, eh?)

Meanwhile, once I got past the boastings of little miss jailbait (or, as they say in Quebec, “petite mademoiselle amorce de prison”), I became rather fascinated with Michael’s reactions to things. There’s something weird and stilted about his dialogue here (“Hooo!” “You, April … are my baby sister!”). It becomes extremely hilarious if you imagine Bill Cosby (preferably as Cliff Huxtable) reading the text. It even works with his weird “slow burn” look in the last panel.

Anyway, this strip is amusing in its own right and a welcome respite from the days and days of “Thérèse is an evil, evil, evil, evil person” we’ve had to endure all week so far. Is this the sort of twisted psychosexual conversations that typically occur between siblings? Makes me glad to be an only child.

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For Better Or For Worse, 3/4/05

Kudos to FBOFW! Generally speaking, pop culture depictions of the first three years of any human’s life are shown through some sort of rosy, gauzy filter, depicted as a nonstop cavalcade of pure unadulterated love and hugs and family togetherness and candy canes and happy happy oogie woogies boo boo bean. Too often left out are the crapping and the puking and the screaming and the screaming and the OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP. I mean, I know about this stuff and I don’t even have kids. But too often if you bring any of this up, especially if someone who has chosen to bring forth precious new children into this vale of tears we call “life,” you get accused of hating children in general, of hating your interlocutor’s children in particular, and of hating America.

Fortunately, our friends the Pattersons have already proven their hatred of America by their insistence on being Canadian, so FBOFW can depict the non-Ann-Geddes-little-angel side of toddlerdom with impunity. Though good taste has prevented them from taking on the feces and the vomit, they’ve tackled the screeching with gusto. Fortunately for our protagonists, in the strip after this Michael and Deanna were offered rent-free use of the apartment above them by their landlord (more proof of Canada’s capitalism-spurning anti-American hate). But at least we got to see them get close to the breaking point, which wouldn’t happen in, say, Marvin, even if they don’t actually snap.

Apartment 3-G’s Mim, who recently declared that her baby-sitting experience has, like, totally prepared her for motherhood, is clearly someone who needs to be reading this strip. Her rendezvous with Chuck is inching forward ever so slowly, but I thought this exchange was worth reproducing:

Why would Margo be mean? Um, Lu Ann, where have you been? She doesn’t need a reason — she’s Margo!

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Faithful readers, the day you’ve been waiting for pretty much your whole lives is here. Now, thanks to the good people at CafePress.com, you can purchase high-quality shirts and mugs with your favorite bizarre and incomprehensible quotes from the daily comics. First up is are t-shirts commemorating the catchphrase that swept the nation after it was bellowed at Margo, Apartment 3-G’s enslaved brunette:

Next are some shirts that salute north-of-the-border jive talk from For Better Or For Worse. If you wear this shirt, your friends and school will know that you’re no foob:

And finally, enjoy a little stimulation with your morning coffee when you drink out of a mug adorned with one of Mark Trail’s pearls of pharmacological wisdom:

Act fast if you like these: since I’m too cheap to upgrade beyond the free version of CafePress.com’s story, I can only have one graphic per type of shirt, so I will probably be rotating in new stuff as it comes up. To see what these images would look like actually on the products themselves (and, of course, to buy said products) just visit the Comics Curmudgeon store at http://www.cafepress.com/joshreads. Remember, every penny of profit goes to help pay for my bandwidth costs, and, if I cover that, to help pay for my sweet, sweet booze.