Liz Patterson’s Final Wedding Dress with Teal and Lavender Roses from For Better or For Worse

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Since my 1940s wedding dress attached to a rant on For Better or For Worse is one of the more popular dresses on the blog, I feel like I should bring the saga to a close. Dee ended up altering the supposedly sixty-something-year old dress into something reasonably modern, the Ghost of Grandma made up for fanciful logic on the part of the cartoonist, the flowers were hideous and Liz ended up marrying that creep. All the way up until the vows were said I was hoping Liz would come to her senses, but immediately after that scene I was so over the whole thing, as evidenced by my putting off the dress for four months. If the end of the saga was boring its weird rebirth is mind-numbingly dreary, although sometimes I visit the Foobiverse!’s Journal out of nostalgia and their second-hand psychoanalysis of Lynn is amusing at times. I still follow Foob’s Paradise, though, which is a webcomic that continues the Pattersons’ adult lives.

Since I get so many search queries related to weddings, I’m thinking of doing some sort of “wedding week” perhaps, maybe after Christmas. If you have any pictures of wedding dresses you just love, feel free to post links in the comments so I can get inspired!

The Good Queen is so far holding her own over the other dead queen and the rest of her competitors. She would say that’s only the way things should be, but it’s not over yet. I will do a bonus costume or two for whoever wins, so if you adore one of them get your vote in, send your friends over, post to your weblog and beg your readers to vote for your favorite!

The Original Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter) from the Watchmen Comic Book

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So I’m a big Watchmen fan, and it is with some trepidation that I look towards the new movie. When the trailer came out I watched with joy that was dampened when Brian pointed out that everything looked really shiny and, well, essentially too polished and good; for example, the Night Owl of the comic carries a spare tire, who was this dude in a Night Owl costume looking so svelte? I liked to think that it was a flashback to the younger Night Owl, but I’m not so sure. The comic shows that a bunch of humans dressing up and fighting crime is probably not so cool as we might like to think it is; the movie is positioned to show that wow, it really is badass after all. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, we’ll see.

Of course, I am content to leave most of the obsessing about the content to Brian and the other fanboys and I turn to what I fangirl best, obsessing about the costumes. Already I can tell you I can’t forgive the new Ozymandias — that is, the dude on the far right of this Entertainment Weekly Watchmen cover. My Ozymandias dresses like wacked-out royalty, and it’s not meant to offer protection or hide his identity because he doesn’t need either. So we can get right past that and look at the girls. I’m torn about the original Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter) — the paperdoll for today is based on her outfit in the comic book, and the new version is even more sexed up — particularly I think the stockings are too over-the-top for her times, although I do like that they connect her outfit to her daughter’s. I like the yellow part better in the movie version, though — very cute and feminine. The original stockings plus the original yellow top would be my favorite version. Laurie’s version of the Silk Spectre outfit I don’t like much, but I wasn’t really a fan of the original version either, so it’s a bit of a wash. I like the new design well enough on its own merits, actually, but I don’t think it fits the setting; Laurie’s mom picked out her costume for her, and her mom would have had an eye for what was sexy and showed off her daughter to best advantage. The movie version of the costume is significantly less soft and vulnerable looking — and really, probably more like what Laurie would have picked out for herself. But it’s too serious; Laurie wasn’t serious about the job of being a superheroine (one that her mom chose for her, essentially) until she was in her 30s.

1940s wedding dress (because I’m bitter about Liz Patterson)

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So, I follow For Better or for Worse, even though my husband says “If you don’t like it, why do you read it?” And I don’t know why. I don’t like Anthony. I don’t really like Liz all that much anymore. And when, in a piece of hamfisted foreshadowing, Dee found a boxed 1940s wedding dress found behind a rock in a crawlspace, I didn’t really like that either, especially because it was obvious it would clean up as good as new and that it would fit Liz perfectly. But what the heck, I can suspend emotion and reason to appreciate a good dress, and even if I, like srah, would just as soon see Liz run off at the altar, I can deal with seeing her married there if she is wearing a half-decent gown. And then we saw what that moldy old dress looked like.

I don’t like it. Just look at it, no way it’s a 1940s dress, not with the combination of the neckline and the transparent sleeves. That looks like 1970s to me. See, look at this 1975 pattern illustration. That middle dress looks just like it, with shorter sleeves. (And frankly, if her bridesmaids wore those middle dresses, that would redeem the WHOLE strip for me.) I don’t think it’s really flattering on her, either, I don’t like those sleeves or that huge bustle.

And as I was looking at 1940s and 1970s wedding dresses, I got even more disappointed that hers wasn’t a 1940s dress, and how much fun that would have been to draw, and so I thought, well, I’ll draw one anyways! I based it off of this pattern (and the crown off of this one) and actually, I chose it because I think it would have looked good on Liz — I think the neckline would have suited the way she wears her hair when it’s down, and I think its relative plainness and sleekness suit her better than the heavily beaded and gauzy dress she got. I don’t think she seems to be a very frou-frouy kind of person: she dresses pretty plainly, usually, and doesn’t seem to have a high-maintenance style, so I think that this design works as long as she has her hair down, to offset the straight lines of the dress. I actually did a sketch of her in this dress. I think it works on her pretty well, although if she was actually going out and buying a dress, it probably wouldn’t be this one. But then again, it wouldn’t be the one she got either.

And actually, some of those 1970s dresses are completely awesome, in a half-ironic half-awestruck way. I mean, even if they look dated and a little goofy, I still love the romantic style and ruffles more than I like everything being strapless and sleek these days. Just try and tell me this gal’s wedding wouldn’t have been an absolute delight.. And I rather like this one far on the right, with modified sleeves… and I totally feel like I shouldn’t love the middle one here but I do. I guess I could get behind Liz’s dress if it was her mom’s dress, but 1940s, yeah right.

Yellow Flower Dress from the Far Side

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I was reading an old Far Side book the other day and I swear, half the women wear this dress. So I drew it, because I think it’s funny. (And “I think it’s funny” is always more than adequate justification for paperdolling. Yeah, I do it for the lulz.)

Now that I’m trained in teaching English as a second language, I often read things with an eye to explaining them to a non native speaker, or using them in a lesson. The Far Side fails those tests, 90% of the time, or at least it’d be really darn complicated… It’s amazing the amount of cultural background that goes into just a single one. I’d love to use them in a larger lesson plan, though…