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Wal from Footrot Flats (by Murray Ball), and NZ TV personality Fredd Dagg by John Clarke.
Dagg preceded Footrot Flats by a couple of years, and John Clarke voiced Wal in the movie.
Ball and Clarke died within a month of each other in 2017.
Dagg preceded Footrot Flats by a couple of years, and John Clarke voiced Wal in the movie.
Ball and Clarke died within a month of each other in 2017.
Category Scraps / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 833 x 717px
File Size 84.9 kB
Murray gave a few reasons for ending the strip. I think that became the most cited one, but he also said he was troubled by modern NZ politics and the direction the country was going, and felt FF was becoming a fantasy of a NZ that had largely ceased to exist. He also admitted to simply being pretty tired of doing the same strip for so long. It was really the only major strip he ever wrote which wasn't overtly political.
He'd pretty obviously been chafing at the bit to do something along those lines, and the first thing which came out the year he announced ending FF was 'The Sisterhood' - which feminists still haven't forgiven him for. When he died, one (male) 'activist' wrote ""The author of 'The Sisterhood' died but because he wrote a comic strip about a dog, we're going to forgive him his sexism & anti-feminism". I find that deeply hurtful and ignorant; the guy was an extreme egalitarian and he was passionately upset by any sort of discrimination. Plus, I think 'The Sisterhood' was probably the most dead-on and funniest thing he ever wrote (I don't know if I'm weird about this, but the reasons I love FF don't have much to do with how often it made me laugh. I just loved the characters and the whole detailed, imagined universe of it.)
Finn can't have been the original model for Dog, because he wasn't born til quite a bit later, but it's absolutely true that Murray was terribly cut-up when Finn died. I sent him a 'in sympathy' card at the time, and he wrote back telling me it summed up how 'we're all feeling'. I'd actually just used a card which I liked and had been keeping for years, but it had had three wolves howling on the front, which he obviously interpreted as a depiction of grief.
He'd pretty obviously been chafing at the bit to do something along those lines, and the first thing which came out the year he announced ending FF was 'The Sisterhood' - which feminists still haven't forgiven him for. When he died, one (male) 'activist' wrote ""The author of 'The Sisterhood' died but because he wrote a comic strip about a dog, we're going to forgive him his sexism & anti-feminism". I find that deeply hurtful and ignorant; the guy was an extreme egalitarian and he was passionately upset by any sort of discrimination. Plus, I think 'The Sisterhood' was probably the most dead-on and funniest thing he ever wrote (I don't know if I'm weird about this, but the reasons I love FF don't have much to do with how often it made me laugh. I just loved the characters and the whole detailed, imagined universe of it.)
Finn can't have been the original model for Dog, because he wasn't born til quite a bit later, but it's absolutely true that Murray was terribly cut-up when Finn died. I sent him a 'in sympathy' card at the time, and he wrote back telling me it summed up how 'we're all feeling'. I'd actually just used a card which I liked and had been keeping for years, but it had had three wolves howling on the front, which he obviously interpreted as a depiction of grief.
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