The alternate timelines of FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE

You probably already knew that J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot has been controversial with old school Trek fans, because some of them believe the film's time travel plot essentially erases the last 40-plus years of Star Trek stories. But while it hasn't attracted as much attention, recently another long-running pop culture property has made some abrupt, sweeping, retroactive changes, and its fans are at least as ticked off as the Trekkies.

Canadian cartoonist Lynn Johnston began her popular comic strip For Better Or For Worse in 1979. (Click the image above to buy Just a Simple Wedding: A For Better or For Worse Collection.) For decades she chronicled the daily adventures of the Pattersons, an average family closely based on her own. The characters aged in real time, so Michael and Elizabeth, the children in the strip, grew into adults, while Elly and John, the lead characters based on Johnston and her husband, went from being harried young parents to retired grandparents.

On August 30th, 2008, Johnston ended the ongoing adventures of the Pattersons, with a follow-up strip the next day detailing what happened to everybody in the years ahead. That strip ended with a note that stunned her fans: starting September 1st, Johnston was going to start the whole strip over, sending the characters back to their lives in the late '70s. The strip would become a mix of re-run strips and what Johnston called "new-runs," featuring new material set in the old days.

Overnight, characters who had been senior citizens were young again. Elizabeth, who had been a grown woman getting married mere days before, was suddenly regressed to babbling toddlerhood. Farley, the Patterson family dog who died in 1993, was once again a puppy. But Johnston didn't just hit rewind on the strip and add in a few new gags, she was making changes large and small to the Patterson family history. As she wrote at the time, "I can fix what I don't like about my early work as I add and subtract...redraw and just improve everything."

That "adding and subtracting" has been very controversial with the strip's long-time fans. Some fans have been so upset they've launched their own online comics and prose stories, set in their own versions of Johnston's cartoon world. If the strip that Johnston drew for 29 years could be considered FBOFW Universe A and her revised version is FBOFW Universe B, fans are filling the net with their own versions of FBOFW Universes C, D, and quite possibly on beyond Z.

Foob's Paradise imagines ongoing adventures for the characters of FBOFW Universe B, adventures where Elizabeth called off her wedding to Anthony (a weird, milquetoasty guy widely despised by fans) and characters like Elly and Michael are looked at in a much less flattering light while minor or villainous characters are re-imagined as more complex and interesting people.

The Fifth Panel adds new endings to specific Johnston storylines, as the hypothetical scenes we missed after the day's punchline. For instance, in a story where Michael almost burned to death after he rushed into a burning building to save his laptop, Fifth Panel ends the strip with his wife slapping him for being such an idiot.

Foobar is by far the most surreal and disturbing of the bunch. It supposes that Elly has used awesome and terrifying magical powers to roll the clock back to the '70s, and the characters around her are aware of the changes but are powerless to fight them. Thus, Elizabeth and Mike suddenly finds themselves to be children again, forced to relive their early lives. (As an example of how Foobar weaves its bizarre narrative into Johnston's, here's a Johnston strip and here's Foobar's take on it.) If the whole thing gives you the creeps... Well, that's presumably the idea.

Howard Bunt's Blog, meanwhile, is basic nitpicking, combing through the strips for anachronisms and other inaccuracies. Blunt even critiques Johnston for a "new-run" where Elly used a dryer sheet in an era before they were widely available.

You have to wonder, if these people really find so much to hate about Johnston's strip, why do they devote so much time and energy to it? Well, they've been following the adventures of the Pattersons every day for many years, and now it seems they just can't let it go, no matter how much they wish they could. They're stuck with it... For better or for worse.


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