John and Patience (Patients) Part V

I remember being back in Dallas, Texas and seeing the musical Little Shop of Horrors for the first time, and without ever having seen the Roger Corman movie. Spoiler***I am about to reveal a plot point, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the movie musical ****. There comes the section where the motorcycle, leather-jacket-wearing, girlfriend-abusing villain reveals that his profession is as a dentist. The lyrics leading up to that point go like this:

{In his motorcycle outfit, he sings:}
When I was young and just a bad little kid,
My momma noticed funny things I did.
Like shootin' puppies with a BB-Gun.
I'd poison guppies, and when I was done,
I'd find a pussy-cat and bash in its head.
That's when my momma said...
(What did she say?)
She said my boy I think someday
You'll find a way
To make your natural tendencies pay...

{Big reveal, he has on a dentist’s smock}
You'll be a dentist.
You have a talent for causing things pain!
Son, be a dentist.
People will pay you to be inhumane!

Then there are more lyrics after that. I revealed my experiences with my dentist in my youth a few Howard Bunt Blog entries back, so you can understand my perspective on dental work. When I saw this moment in the musical, I pretty much lost it.

In today’s For Better or For Worse, we have John Patterson lamenting to his assistant Jean Baker about stereotypes of dentists. The predictable joke comes as John stereotypes lawyers.

When I look at this strip, I see something else. John is sharing his personal insecurities and having coffee with Jean Baker. In For Better or For Worse, that’s practically like having an affair. In the modern strip, you almost never see John have a moment like this with anyone. John has receded so far from the focus of the strip, that even the moment where he sold his business to Dr. Everett Callahan went unnoticed in the strip. More importantly, any emotion, any character development, any doubts, anything which would make for a good storyline involving this event has been lost by having John simply come home one day and say, “I told Everett, I am only working on Fridays in September.”

In this respect, the reprints work against Lynn Johnston. The strips of the last few days have been on John and his career as a dentist, and I find it refreshing to see old strips from 1979, which did not focus on gender wars or the idea that John and Elly are terrible parents. I even like the idea that John has feelings. I cannot remember seeing a strip like this with John in it in any of the archived strips going back to 2003. This reprint shows me, that somewhere along the way, John Patterson stopped developing as a character. He became the dentist who likes model trains and fast cars, and he has not progressed past that point in all this time.

Frankly, there have been opportunities. When Elly’s dad has his stroke, John disappeared and missed the chance to show everyone what he would do in Elly’s time of need.