Friday, August 24, 2007

Retcon 101

I remember years ago, well-known comic book creator John Byrne told the fine folks at DC Comics, he wanted to take over the Superman line of comics. However his condition in doing that was he got to start the whole story over and tell it the way he wanted to tell it. In other words, he wanted to retcon the whole Superman history which had been established back in 1938. Well, the fine folks at DC Comics let him do that, and we ended up with a Superman where Lex Luthor was an evil businessman and not an evil scientist, where Lois Lane had brown hair instead of her traditional black, and all kinds of things like that.

That retcon really didn’t work very well (Superman is suddenly young and inexperienced, but Batman isn’t, for example), but it was still quite a bit better than the one Lynn Johnston is pushing us through this week. The majour difference is that when John Byrne did his retcon of Superman, he was just starting a series of stories with years of stories to come, where people had the opportunity to get used to this new history of Superman.

With For Better or For Worse, the retcon of Anthony Caine’s marriage occurs just before the end of the strip leading into 2 weeks of the hybrid. It appears to be for no other purpose than to say, “Ignore what you read before. Anthony is a great guy and perfect for Elizabeth. Now feel happy for them when they get married in October.” However, for loyal readers, that wedding is going to come way too fast to be anything but irritated that our understanding of the story of Anthony and Elizabeth developed over years is no longer considered to be the official storyline. The Superman fans complained too, but they got over it (most of them anyway). The flawed Anthony with the ugly moustache has turned into the perfect, clean-shaven Anthony, and he is a less interesting character for it.

5 Comments:

Blogger April Patterson said...

Gah, and they're retconning STUPID things along the way. Thérèse had the baby because they already had a house? NO. As you know, they put in an OFFER on the house once Françoise had been born. Stupid, stupid retcon.

4:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, Howard, it's been awhile.

I can't help but feel that LJ is projecting her resentment of her first husband, as the arrangements between Therese and Anthony seem to mirror the arrangments between LJ and whatever-his-name was: LJ got the house, etc., and whoever-it-was walked.

This couldn't happen under current Canadian law. Section 11(1)(b) of the Divorce Act (Canada) sets out that the Court has a duty to satisfy itself that reasonable arrangements have been made for the support of any children of the marriage, having regard to the legislated guidelines, and if no such arrangements have been made, to stay (stop) the divorce until such arrangements have been made. This isn't exactly new law -- this is how it has been since about 1996.

As we know Therese and Anthony are divorced, we also know that she's paying child support. The amount she has to pay is based on her income. If she's making $80K - $100K/year, she's paying between $719 and $877/month for the Table (basic) amount. Plus she would have to pay her proportionate share of special expenses, such as daycare. They're not eligible for any subsidies, so Anthony must be paying $800 to $1K/month for daycare. Bottom line: Guideline support for Francoise would be well over $1K/month, tax free to Anthony.

As for the debt, my guess is that Therese didn't demand that the house be sold to get her share of the equity, and poor, poor Anthony is burdened with the mortgage debt for the house that he and Francoise and Liz are all going to live in. BTW, when Anthony eventually sells the house, his profit will be tax free. (In Canada, capital gains on a principal residence are tax free.)

And why doesn't Therese see Francoise? This is the oddest thing of all. Ontario has a system of supervised access centres and third-party exchange centres for high conflict situations, not that there's any evidence to suggest that this was one of them. When the parent and child used to live together, I've never -- and I mean that literally -- seen a parent who did not want access to his/her child. Very occasionally, the access parent does quit visiting. Most often, this is due to perceived interference with access by the custodial parent, who either makes the child unavailable for access, or turns the child against the access parent.

I'm sending my bill to Corbeil. ;)

9:26 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

One last point -- Therese's support payments would be directly deducted from her pay by her employer, who would remit them to the Ontario government, who in turn would pay them to Anthony.

LJ really, really annoys me.

9:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Federal Child Support Guidelines came into effect on May 1, 1997. Thank you, LJ, for making me so anal that I had to look up the date.

9:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was hoping that today - finally - we'd see an honest depiction of the Caine marriage. The contradictions that have been cited in the above posts are glaring and don’t seem to advance the story. I get the impression that this week’s strips were written without even taking the time to review the old ones.

Very strange and very disappointing.

Anon NYC

6:35 PM  

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