You know, if I had a nickel for every time I made a hobbydrama post about a Canadian cartoonist starting a major controversy through their comic in the mid 1990's, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. (And unlike the last one, this one is about the fans being awful, not the creator.)
Also: Trigger warning, mentions of real-world homophobia and a murder.
For Better or for Worse was (and sort of is) a comic strip by cartoonist Lynn Johnston which began in 1979. It's currently in repeats, but until 2008, it featured the lives of the Patterson family and their friends, who aged in real time along with their readers. At first, it was about John and Elly Patterson and their young children Michael and Elizabeth, all of whom were based on Johnston's own family (with Elly based on the cartoonist herself). As her real children got older, their fictional equivalents did as well, and by the mid 1990's, Michael and his friends were in their late teens. Around this point, Johnston decided to have Lawrence Poirier, one of Michael's friends who hadn't been featured as much in the strip, come out to his parents as gay.
According to a 2007 interview, Johnston came out with the idea for the storyline after her friend, gay comedy writer Michael Boncoeur, was murdered. Although the killing had nothing to do with his sexuality, the response by the authorities was, according to Johnston, "like 'Well, that's one more of them off the streets.' In the end, the young man who took a knife to him was ultimately seen as the victim. "
In the comic, Lawrence tells Michael Patterson that he's gay and has a boyfriend, and Michael encourages him to tell his parents. He does so, and is kicked out of the house; later, his parents apologize and accept him back. It is, overall, a rather sweet story.
Of course, this was 1993.
The reaction
After the strip where Lawrence comes out as gay, Johnston began receiving letters from readers. Although the reception in her own country of Canada was mostly positive, For Better or For Worse was also widely read throughout the United States, and according to Johnston, many of the letters were from the Southern U.S. A lot of them included death threats, profanity, Biblical quotations or all of the above. Many people sent in organized protest letters en masse, or dropped their newspaper subscriptions by the thousands. Dozens of papers ran reruns of old s
... keep reading on reddit ➡FBOFW was a comic strip about the lives of the Patterson family: Elly Patterson, her husband John, and their children Michael and Elizabeth. All four were based on cartoonist Lynn Johnston's real family, with Elly based on Johnston herself. The strip was beloved for its realistic portrayal of family life, with the characters aging in real time and developing from year to year; many readers felt that they had grown up along with the Patterson family. Of course, if this were just a post about how much everyone loved the strip, it wouldn't be on r/hobbydrama, so I'm going to talk about how much the internet hated the ending.
By 2005, FBoFW was still generally beloved, but some readers complained that it had lost the realism they had once loved in the strip. In 1991, Elly and John had had a third child, April, the first Patterson to not be based on a real person. (Apparently, Johnston wanted another daughter in real life, but, depending on which source you're reading, either didn't have time to have another kid or couldn't. I'm not sure which one was the case.) While the two other Patterson kids were now adults, April was a teenager in the final years of the strip, and the strip fell victim to that far-too-common trap of middle-aged writers attempting to write dialogue for teenagers: it sounds horribly stilted and has no resemblance to actual teenagers. April's repeated use of the term foob as an insult--a cross between "fool" and "boob" (in the extremely old-fashioned sense of "goofy person", not "breast")--led to some fans nicknaming the setting of FBoFW the "Foobiverse".
This came to a head with the Roadside comic, on January 26, 2005, in which April and one of her friends use a bizarre list of slang terms which no actual teenager, past or present, has ever said. The word "roadside" was particularly mocked; while it's hard to find much online discussion of it (since it was sixteen years ago), I did find a custom license plate someone had made, as well as a thong with "Roadside" printed on the crotch (only $10.99!) and a parody of "We Will Rock You" that's pretty emblematic of the mid-2000s internet in general. That strip represented a bigger complaint with the series; the characters didn't feel nearly as real anymore.
A large part of this
... keep reading on reddit ➡
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Hi. What are some news companies that are propaganda tools that are so biased and dumb they sound like a parody. Here in the UK we have some very stupid far right wing papers that like to shit on poor people, immigrants and just shit takes on basically everything. I'm curious to see how different/similar propaganda is in LATAM. What are some news articles in your country with the shittiest takes? Right or left wing, and if you can, please link me one particularly stupid article. Thanks and enjoy your day.
