A retconning we shall go!

A short time back I talked about how the syndicated strip For Better or Worse went into some sort of odd retcon mode. well, base on my reading of that strip, I couldn’t help myself but to construct a Spider-Man strip that dealt with the same subject.

I present that strip here.



Oh, in case you don’t recognize him, the guy in the shower is Patrick Duffy, who came back from the dead a year after he left Dallas, because the writers of the show reached a wall with stories, and needed him back, so they decided that the previous year’s worth of stories were all “Imaginary.”

Sound familiar?

Reboot is all the rage

OK, so we all know by now about the recent reboot of Spider-Man this year, well, apparently this sort of reboot is swiftly becoming all the rage, and Lynn Johnson who produces For Better or Worse recently decided to reboot her long-running syndicated strip. On September first, after 29 years of on-going continuity (at the age of 61), she decided to reset her own strip, and go back to the beginning.


She posted the reason for this reset on her site:

The move comes a year after the Reuben Award-winning cartoonist attempted semi-retirement by mixing classic reprints of “For Better or for Worse” with new panels that advanced the present-day story. That allowed Johnston to go back and forth in time in the lives of her characters.

For the full story...

I’m not sure what to make of this, nor am I sure that I like it (but hey, don’t listen to me, I didn’t like that the syndicate decided to keep running Peanuts after Charles Schultz passed away. because now — as much as people like this strip — there is some cartoonist out there (or several cartoonists) who can’t get their work into print because Peanuts is occupying their real estate.

Imagine, if you will, if Schultz had been denied publication because some older “revered” cartoonist strip was hanging on after that guy had passed away. I respect the right for the syndicate to make money, but I think that Shultz would have objected (or sahould have objected) to this sort of thing.