Run, Julia!
I finally have an excuse to write about the comic strip everyone loves to hate, For Better or For Worse. If you read Pop Culture Junk Mail or Fresh Hell (I linked to both of their FBOFW categories) you’ve already been following the saga of Liz and her hateful true love, Anthony. (If you want to know why Anthony is hateful, the “Why I Hate Anthony” essay is a good start.) (#8 is the one that really gets me.)
This week things have been really heating up. Anthony shaved the mustache that made him look like a grandpa, and his date for the wedding turned out to be a socially awkward chick who showed Liz her dental work two panels into their first meeting. And today it was revealed that–wait for it–she’s fat too!
Here’s what they had to say on Snarkfest today:
God, that pisses me off. Especially since I’m fairly certain every person in this strip ever has been tall and lithe except this one girl. What is she implying here, anyway? Anthony is clearly settling because he can’t have Liz? Bitch.
Now I get it. She’s a jolly fat girl who acts funny and cute because she can never, ever be pretty or desirable. Somebody threw Melissa McCarthy, Lesley Boone, and Ricki Lake in a blender and it all came out wrong.
I cut Lynn massive amounts of slack in general, but the reveal of his date being fat and this clearly being a way to telegraph UNDESIRABLE/NOT A REAL THREAT pissed me off bigtime. Quick! Write her letters and demand she marry Anthony to Julia to prove she’s not sizeist!
I can’t wait to see where this goes next! We all know Julia is cannon fodder for the Liz/Anthony relationship, but could there be a fat joke around the bend? If anyone else is talking about this, let us know in the comments. Julia could totally do better, though.
Posted by mo pie
Email us
Via Patrick, the Comics Curmudgeon (here http://joshreads.com/?p=1116) said:
So apparently they’re just going to keep making Julia shorter and wider in the hopes that eventually we won’t like her anymore. Well, guess what? She could be a God-damned puddle and I’d still find her more appealing than Liz “Singularity Of Self-Absorbed Passivity” Patterson. TEAM JULIA FOREVER! WOO!
I don’t think there will be any overt fat jokes. But it’s clear that Johnston is using the fat = undesirable shorthand to indicate that Julia will never be a serious contender for Anthony’s love.
Johnston has a history of making mean people ugly (the Kelpfroths) and good people pretty (the Pattersons). Except when they are pretty and ambitious — then they turn out to be evil (Therese, Becky). It’s not surprising to see her essentially telling us that anyone who is short and chubby is not romantic material.
I did not realize u were a fan of FBOFW.. I have enjoyed that strip for years and always irritated that they simply did not marry Elizabeth off to Anthony. Seems this has been a bit of a set up all along.. I do agree that Julia is not a contender here..and I did think it was odd that they made her short and fat, considering the only other short and round character is Shannon , Aprils friend who has Learning issues. I did find it irritating for Julia to have that type of personality too.. I would have liked her to be something of a contender for Anthony… or maybe Anthony should just suck it up.. and tell Elizabeth the truth. I think I need to get a life if I can read this much into a comic strip LOL
I would comment on this post, but the 1982 button on my time machine is broken.
Like we should all care what some aging and irrelevant Canadian cartoonist thinks of fat people. I think I last looked at For Better or For Worst when I was home sick in the third grade.
Also, the FAT one is supposed to be the socially awkward one?
ALL of the characters in that strip have ALWAYS looked like they belong at a Star Trek or Doctor Who convention. Nerdy haircuts, nerdy glasses — and not in the ironic hipster sense of nerdy. More in the “Trapped in a Canadian Dress Barn in 1988” sense.
“ALL of the characters in that strip have ALWAYS looked like they belong at a Star Trek or Doctor Who convention.”
Hey, easy. Some of us wear cute semi-medieval Galadriel-ish gowns to the conventions.
RUN, JULIA, RUN!!!!
That is all.
“I would comment on this post, but the 1982 button on my time machine is broken.”
Maybe I’m just feeling benevolent or slightly drunk, but this is funny.
OMG, I started reading a couple strips before that one and thought this one blinked at me. I thought, “Dude, you have got to step away from the computer once in a while.” But then I stared at it longer and they characters WERE blinking at me. Creepy.
Also, yeah, the fat = loser shorthand sucks. They do that on TV all the time to with both men and women.
I am so psyched to see crossover between two blogs I read and love: BFD and the Comics Curmudgeon. Neato!
Anyway, on topic, I like the theory developing over at Comics Curmudgeon that Julia could end up making out with Mason the hunky groomsman. She has way too much personality for Blandthony.
A suggestion to the bloggers:
Any way you can illustrate each of your posts with a small pic?
Like the “Clive Owen” with a pic of , say, Clive, this one with a pic of the strip, that kind of thing?
I really think it would help navigation-wise, and help digest/sum up each post better. It took me a few minutes to figure out what this post was about (ie, doing the “quick skim” that most people do in glancing at blogs).
a – If mo used an image of the FBOFW strip she’d be sured for copyright infringement. Using stock pictures legally can be expensive too. The person who took the pic of Clive Owen likes to be paid for it. It’s a nice idea, but not really feasible.
PQ, thumbnails qualify as fair use, actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Actually, your original book title would have too, come to think of it. But I like the new one better.
PastaQueen – yeeg! I looked at that strip yesterday and the blinking totally escaped me. Creepy!!
Y’know, I’d noticed that “Liz and Anthony” is rivaling the Sopranos finale for “Pop culture thingy most likely to inspire lots of pissed-off blog entries” this week, but I had no idea why. This makes a lot more sense now.
I don’t follow FBOFW that much these days, but the first time I read the strip on the web and one of the characters BLINKED at me, I almost ran down the hall screaming. Creep-ee.
I think Julia is actually supposed to be an older person
(as closer to his mom’s age then a real type of character.)
Not that it makes it any better.
And Liz’s character is such a fricken whiner…
Anthony irritates me…but I just thought that was because the way he is drawn…his character…everything reminds me of my early unfortunate marriage…
New strip! And Patrick just pointed out that she’s the classic fat best friend.
Was this dialogue supposed to be funny?:
The fat friend, trying to be polite as she’s ignored by the social retard she’s been apparently forced to attend a wedding with: “Anthony, would you like some punch?”
Anthony: “No thanks Julia” [and then, to self in thought balloon, commenting on shock of seeing his former flame: “I just had one”]
Jesus. Is this the kind of punchline that passes for humor among middle-aged fat-phobic Canadians? Just wondering.
Elizabeth, looking interested: “Anthony looks so DIFFERENT! He shaved his mustache and got new glasses!”
Oh yeah. Hot. I’m fanning myself as I type.
So, as someone who hasn’t read this comic since the Reagan administration, can someone please explain why a twenty-something year old guy even . . . HAD a mustache at any point in life (is he my high school earth science teacher)?
And … his OLD glasses were even worse than his current pair, I presume ?? That is difficult to conceptualize. His current glasses look like something from the Dwight Schrute collection.
TIA.
Here is Anthony with his glasses and mustache. Sexy, huh?
Also, nice call on Dwight Schrute glasses.
Wow. And, isn’t that other guy Elizabeth’s brother?? They look EXACTLY alike. Disturbing.
I wonder if they’ll have a make-over montage in which the fat friend gets “transformed” into the strip’s definition of a “swan”?
They’ll have her huffing and puffing on an exercise bike to lose weight, take her to scavenge a pair of specs from the dumpster outside the nursing home for retired mathematicians where apparently all the characters meet their optical needs, take shopping for casualwear at a Northern Ontario Goodwill …