Remembering Farley: Browse The Strips

Friday March 15, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Apropos of making a pet’s meals as attractive as ours: There’s a commercial on now which shows the contents of a can of cat food neatly positioned on a plate with savoury flecks of something-or-other glinting deliciously from the sides. It looks like a gourmet treat. I had a pampered cat once and I made the mistake of heating up her dinner. Bad idea. It doesn’t matter how good a can of pet food looks, the smell is still…emetic.

Saturday March 16, 2019

Lynn's Comments: When my son was teething, I got tired of the mushy residue left after the available teething biscuits had been gummed. I had a dog (Farley) at the time, and in desperation, I gave Aaron a dog biscuit. He liked it. Dog biscuits became our teething chew of choice. Maybe there’s an invention here for an enterprising mom!

Saturday March 23, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Our Farley, the real one, was hard to handle. We took him to dog training classes and worked hard to make the lessons stick…but the only things that stuck to Farley were burrs and briars from the ravine behind our house. He considered himself a free spirit, and there were times I’d have given him away—for free.

Monday March 25, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I got into reader hot-water for using the word “stoopid”. The point being that I had spelled the word incorrectly. If I was going to use it at all, it should be correctly spelled. I explained that I had spelled it the way it sounds when spoken by an enraged kid. Interestingly, they said nothing about the inappropriate use of the word “dumb.” How stoopid!

Wednesday March 27, 2019

Lynn's Comments: This strip allows me to comment on the sad decline of the beloved "corner store." These wonderful family run shops were part of the community–a place to go for small items and a conversation when there was time. I regularly walk around my neighbourhood and I know where every corner store used to be. The last one has just reopened as a specialty coffee shop. Times have changed.

Friday March 29, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I once spent all day hiding in the lane because I was afraid my mom would find out that I had broken the milk bottles on our front porch. It was an accident. I’d been swinging a hula hoop and hit them by accident. In the end, she was angrier at me because I’d gone missing, and not because I’d knocked over the bottles.

Sunday April 21, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Any opportunity to draw Farley at his scruffy best, gave me a thrill. I loved to draw him eating and scratching and burping and being thoroughly, happily disgusting. Not only was he great fun to draw, I had to “get into the spirit of the dog” in order to draw him well. Being Farley for a few hours was a happy, funny and relaxing time...and I have to say, he really was my favourite character!

Monday July 15, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Here’s another punch line that could never be translated! When strips like this one reached international papers, the dialogue, and therefore the gag, had to be changed entirely. The translators who did this were excellent creative writers who often had an almost impossible job.

Friday September 27, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Whenever a serious story was on the rise, I always had to remember there were other things going on in the Pattersons' lives. There were other characters to include. In real life, there so many facets to every day…we don't focus on just one topic. Here, Farley comes in to break up the pregnancy storyline.

Friday March 6, 2020

Lynn's Comments: I omitted the top of the first 3 panels here just to see if it would make a nice change to the look of the strip. I think it did. It was around this time that I started to white out borders and let parts of the illustration extend outside the line. I’ve never been one to keep things the same; another reason why the characters "grew up."