Six Hundred Years of Selfishness

A couple of weeks ago, For Better or For Worse, a pun-heavy Canadian strip that had been around since 1979, ended...sort of. Instead of tying up her storylines (which had become unbelievably cloying) and bounding off into the sunset, creator Lynn Johnston decided to go back to the beginning and do it all again.

Infuriatingly, Johnston has since been retconning her whole universe, not merely telling different bits of the original story but changing key aspects of that story. Connie, once "divorced and on the make" (as she herself put it in the early '80s), has now simply had a fling with some mysterious person named "Pablo" and accidentally produced a child. Annie has had her second baby a couple of years ahead of schedule (in the comic below, we see older brother Christopher, who should actually be an infant at this point). I am bracing myself for the inevitable entry of the universally despised Anthony Caine, future husband of major character Elizabeth Patterson; I expect Johnston is going to manipulate the story so that the two of them meet in preschool.

In other words: thank you, Ms. Johnston, for giving me the perfect excuse to transport your characters back to the Middle Ages. You did it to yourself, really. I mean...why stop at 1979? What's wrong with 1379? You would have liked it. Morality was a big deal, and puns were encouraged. I should introduce you to the word "queynt." You could work it into a punchline.

The comics have turned out rather small (curse you, Blogger), so click away.