Last Sunday’s episode of For Better or For Worse presents an interesting paradox: the punchline involved John, the husband,writing on a dollar bill, but Canada (where the strip is set) did away with dollar bills in favour of coins in 1987. FBOFW true believers will, of course, remember that creator Lynn Johnston re-booted the strip in 2008; the presence of the dollar bill, though, implies more than a simple reboot, and leads to the suspicion that the 2007 period in which several different timelines appeared simultaneously in the strip was not a simple narrative device but actually reflected some untold crisis in the universe of the strip. Based on the available evidence, we can say that last Sunday’s punchline reflects one of the following possibilities:
- The new continuity takes place in a universe where the world changes more slowly, so that dollar bills are still in use; we can call this the Earth-2 version.
- The new continuity is meant to be a darker, edgier version of the original, and thus is set in the United States; call this Ultimate For Better or For Worse.
- Last Sunday’s punchline was a “rogue joke” that somehow survived the annihilation of the previous timeline. As time goes on, the implications of the paradox it embodies will wreak havoc on continuity and on causality itself, leading to a crossover event in which multiple versions of each character appear and Farley the dog sacrifices himself to save all of the universes.
- Due to the commercial success of the strip, Johnston has as little familiarity with small denominations as George H.W. Bush had with barcode scanners.
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Arrrgggggghh!!!!! I was clicking through to find out that Chris Farley was still alive and going to save us all in a massive Tommy Boy/Black Sheep/Beverly Hills Ninja crossover.
So he can’t still have an old Canadian buck on him? And what’s more worthless than recently out-of-circulation currency?
“what’s more worthless than recently out-of-circulation currency?”
For Better of For Worse, of course.
My answer to this is the same as my answer to SUPERMAN/SUPERBOY’S MISSION FOR PRESIDENT KENNEDY:
It’s a cheap-ass reprint, you nerd.
Man, For Better or Worse is sort of the ultimate example of how hard it is to get something off the comics page no matter how half-assed it is, isn’t it?
Lynn Johnston doesn’t want to do FBOW anymore, so she decides to quit and put it in reprints. But then she realizes that cancellation is pretty much the only way a strip gets dropped anymore(and let’s face it, FBOW is not exactly Peanuts). So instead, she calls it a relaunch, slips in one new strip a week, partially redraws another, and calls it week. Seriously, I wish I could land a job where I could be that lazy.
She did a daily comic strip for almost 30 years and you think she’s lazy now? Seriously?
The comics page is dying along with the newspaper. The days of another Dilbert exploding onto the scene in print are long over. Young people have given up on newspapers and I don’t think replacing a couple of old strips are going to keep or bring any of them back. If people reading papers want old FBOFW and Peanuts strips, eh, let ’em have ’em.
No no, not Ultimate. This smacks of DC.
For Better Or ElseWorse(tm).
John is in Canada but often crosses over in to the U.S illegally for various purposes, the dollar was an American dollar he brought back. He got a secret kick out of defacing American currency. If Obama wasn’t a chicken Ottawa or some other weird place would be a nuclear cinder by now.
Crisis is affecting the FBOFW timeline, eh? That explains why I saw Elizabeth dating Scalphunter a few weeks back. The Crisis may be crossing over with other strips, too; pretty sure I saw Deadman in the Family Circus, alongside Not Me and Nobody.
FOOBAR, man.
Canadian Tire money?
joecab: Pearls Before Swine stands as a stark contradiction to your ‘there can never be another Dilbert’ thesis, doesn’t it?