For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for October 27, 2017

Oh, you’re such a tease, Michael.

I think Michael is the spook.

1. Instead of just his usual receding hairline, the hair on the right side of face has descended so he appears to be looking only out of his left eye even in the final panel when we can see the right side of his face clearly and still can’t see his eye. The real Michael doesn’t cover his right eye with his hair, but spook Michael does.

2. Michael puts his hand in his pocket and instead of the pocket being near his hip, it is on his side thigh like it was a pair of cargo pants. While cargo pants were first worn in 1938 by British military personnel, they did not become a popular fashion item until the 1990s a few years after this comic strip was published. Clearly spook Michael is actually the ghost of one of those 1938 British military personnel.

In the fourth panel Elizabeth looks just like her mother.

Strips like this make me glad I was an only child!

What fool let Michael tuck Lizzie in?

Michael will pay for this. Younger sisters never forget.

When my much younger cousin was about 12, he would not sleep upstairs (an attic that had been converted to bedrooms) at our grandparents’ house because he was afraid of spooks. Everyone else was telling him how silly he was to believe in ghosts and he shrugged it off as if they were just humoring him. I told him that ghosts only haunt where they died and reminded him that no one had died in that house (our grandfather had built it). A couple of months later, I got a letter from my aunt who told me she didn’t know what I had said to him, but he no longer had a problem sleeping upstairs.

So where’s Flo?

“They’re coming to get you Barbara… er, Elizabeth!”

In my day it was “monsters” under the bed, not spooks.

Mike needs his butt kicked

Lynn’s Notes:

My dad was particularly fond of Halloween. He loved to tell us scary stories and he was good at it, too. He once told me that if I couldn’t see into a corner at night, where the walls meet the ceiling, then there was a goblin in the corner. I believed him and would lie awake waiting for the goblin to appear…

This is all alien to me. I would never consider scaring my brothers like that.

When my youngest son first started watching, “The Walking Dead,” he was in his 20’s. Didn’t stop him from getting so freaked out that for quite a while he slept with a loaded .357 Mag.

Aww, like father, like son.

YOU get to stay up all night with her when she wakes up with nightmares.

Years ago before the strip started, there was a child molestor called the “Millborough Masher”. A lynch mob had burned him to the death, and two of the participants were a young John and Elly. The criminal vowed he would get his revenge by coming after the lynch mob’s kids in their dreams. Looks like Michael is also in trouble with Elizabeth.