Candace and Paula: are they supposed to be the same person?

The interesting thing about Candace is that when she first appears in 1989, she looks a Hell of a lot like Paula from first grade. Oh, sure, she's got the goofy teeth of being a yokel but otherwise, she could pretty much be an older version of the irritating little girl boasting to Lizzie about all the stuff her mother lets her wear and not caring overly much when Lizzie tries to explain that Mommy is scared that she's losing her childhood. The next time we see Candace, it's a year and a half later and she's pretty much established herself as sort of an avatar for peer pressure and why it's just awful that some child or some designer have an opinion on what Lizzie should look like when it's obvious as all Hell to Lynn and her followers that only authority figures like mothers who are still angry that they lacked the body and the language and principals whose commentary about air conditioning reveals a hidden prurience who are allowed to decide that sort of thing.

Given the odd similarity between the characters, either one of two things could be happening. The first thing is what eventually happened to April when Lynn wanted to start bleating about how awful it is that children pass through teenaged years and pretty much make her look like Molly Thomaas. In that case, Lynn is simply using dark hair/fashion plate as a sort of shorthand for why it's bad that little children follow the advice of someone who isn't their mother when it comes to what to look like. The second possibility is that she forgot she named the character Paula and wanted to give a tip of the Fooby felt tip to a friend.

Elizabeth the Small.

The interesting thing about Wednesday's strip is that kefkaownsall saw something that escaped most people. While most of us were focusing on the fact that it looked as if the children had never laid eyes on one another before, she noticed that Lizzie looks out of place. It seemed to her as if Lizzie were a preschooler who'd somehow wandered into a first grade classroom.

This, I think, is a problem that dogged Liz pretty much her whole childhood. Always and ever, it was commented on that while most of her peers looked their age, she still looks as if she's a bit younger than the rest of the group. I've told you about the innate conservatism that has John and Elly prefer her to dress to not impress because they think that there's safety in drab clothing. I've told you about how Elly mentally subtracts a couple of years from her age because she adds decades to her own. What I haven't told you is that the reason Elly justifies that in her mind is that Liz has always been a little bit shorter than most people her age are and always looked a little bit more baby-faced than Candace and Dawn. She thus simply looks as if she's younger than she really is. Add in a mother who hates peer pressure because she thinks letting her child decide for herself what she would wear means that said child hates her and a father who's trying his damnedest to be Canadian Content Tony Micelli and we end up with a lot of class photos that end up with the Weird Frenchy Girl getting screamed at because she correctly identifies Liz as looking as if she doesn't actually belong with the big kids.