Pablo the unnecessary and Pete the prosaic.....

[dreadedcandiru2]

In the original version of Foob history, Pete Landry was the only person that Connie, who was originally a local girl, ever dated. He was clearly acknowledged to have left her and their son about a few months before the curtain rose on the Pattersons. This is not a pleasant thing to have happened but it does do so; we were left with the assumption that he, while not living too far way, managed successfully to pretty much fade from her view. If pressed, Lynn would probably have said he'd moved closer to his work. She then decided that he, who was never meant to appear, would have to be more distant so as to make his invisibility make sense to her; that's because his being a dead-beat dad living in Toronto didn't feel right to her despite its being the most likely way things would work. This is why she had him go back to Brazil; it's also about the same time that she decided to change who Connie was; instead of a woman who got messed up because the only man she ever loved never loved her, she mutated into a woman who struck out at finding Mister Right twice. Pete thus became the jerkwad control freak who couldn't hack having to deal with some other guy's kid; I should also think that the melanin content of his skin decreased. This way, Pete could live in Toronto and Lawrence as-yet-to-be-named Dad could live in Rio. He only got a name when someone needed to scare Mike when Deanna was working the need to explore new things out of her system like a good little Foob; he appeared as a visible representation of the fear that a pasty white woman would fall for someone swarthy only to vanish when revealed how feeble that threat was.

Comments

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

I really have no problem with Lynn Johnston altering Peter Landry's history over time. Very few writers writing a story over as a long a period as Lynn Johnston could hardly be expected to hold to the continuity of a character she wrote decades ago, when she wants to move the character in a different direction from a place where she had not been in decades. I think Beth Cruikshank did a reasonable job putting together these 2 storylines in her Who's Who biography. In my mind it worked, but if I were to go back to specific strips from 1980, I would have to acknowledge that those strips would no longer be considered canon.

It's like looking at the Blondie strip and realizing that Blondie was originally a gold-digging flapper and Dagwood was the heir to a fortune. Given enough time, things change. The modern characters are nothing like their origins.

The real challenge to Lynn Johnston, in going back and doing these new-runs, is to take the old strips and rewrite them to match the canon of the character's history as Beth Cruikshank interpreted it. There were all kinds of storyline possibilities available as Lynn could have shown Elly and Connie discussing and comparing Pablo vs. Pete and laying out the whole timeline and how a 35-ish, single mom would feel about having that kind of history. The problem at the heart of this is the work ethic of Lynn Johnston. A person who is using reprints and new-runs because she wants to work less, is not the choice for this kind of operation.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

There were all kinds of storyline possibilities available as Lynn could have shown Elly and Connie discussing and comparing Pablo vs. Pete and laying out the whole timeline and how a 35-ish, single mom would feel about having that kind of history. The problem at the heart of this is the work ethic of Lynn Johnston. A person who is using reprints and new-runs because she wants to work less, is not the choice for this kind of operation.

That would have been a far better way for Lynn to spend her time than showing John fail hilariously at being a Mister Mom; it would also have allowed Lynn to keep the promise she made to use the new-runs add depth to the character's backgrounds. I would have liked to see the sort of extended flashback she used when Liz explained why it was that Thérèse is evil incarnate wrapped in a poutine.