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(Alpha Flight #10)
This panel is from whence comes my headcanon that JP had multiple foster homes between his second orphaning and being taken in by Raymonde, and kind of a crap homelife even with the relatives that took him in after his and Jeanne-Marie’s biological parents died.Here’s what we know about JP’s early life:
He and Jeanne-Marie were orphaned as infants when their parents died in an automobile collision.
The twins were split up because the Martins, cousins of their mother, could only afford to take in one child. They adopted Jean-Paul and sent Jeanne-Marie to live at Madame DuPont’s with physically and emotionally abusive nuns.
Jean-Paul’s adopted family moved out of the area due to his father’s job with the RCMP; they fell out of touch with Madame DuPont’s and Jean-Paul never knew he had a sister.
Jean-Paul was orphaned again at six years old due to another car crash. He went into foster care and was never adopted.
At 12 - 14 years of age, he ran away from his foster home and met Raymonde Belmonde.
(As per usual, unless there’s some terribly awesome storytelling involved, the contributions to the canon that hit print first are considered to have precedence, except where they contradict what came before them. Hence Byrne’s canon being given the most weight and later reveals being grafted onto that framework, while Mantlo and Austen will be more or less ignored. Also, I apologize for any misrepresentation of Canada’s adoption/foster system contained herein, as I’m working off of source material that’s both fictionalized and about thirty years out of date.)So let’s start spackling together some backstory, shall we?
Laying things out: To start with, the Martins were not the best choice to take in the twins. Even if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding the difficult decision to split up twin siblings, they then agreed to have Jeanne-Marie given over to a state-run school, where there would be little to no chance of the twins getting to know each other as they grew up. Then, to top it off, when the Martin family was relocated, they couldn’t even be assed to keep in touch with Madame DuPont’s, showing little concern for the upbringing of their own flesh and blood, let alone the emotional impact this could have on the twins down the line. Jean-Paul doesn’t so much as have the memory of being told he has a sister - even at six years old, the news that you have siblings is something that would stand out in a child’s mind, so the simplest conclusion is that his adoptive parents never told him Jeanne-Marie existed.So then the Martins died, bringing us to the end of canon to start in on speculation such as can be drawn from from Jean-Paul’s reactions above. This is not long after he’d learned that the people he’d gone his whole life thinking were his biological parents were anything but, and his reaction is pretty much a shrug. In deed and word he shows that he has absolutely no attachment to the memory of the Martin family, yet he still held on to the name until he had something definite to replace it with.This implies a couple of things. First, that Jean-Paul never bonded very closely with his adoptive parents. Second, that he never formed much of a family bond with any of the foster families or potential adoptive parents that came after, either.(I do view a lot of the behavior of the both twins, especially in the early Byrne issues, as being the result of untreated attachment disorder — particularly Jean-Paul’s general belligerence toward anyone who isn’t Jeanne-Marie, and Aurora’s inappropriate affection and flirtatiousness. So a lot of this is being examined through that filter.)The Martins — as mentioned above — aren’t going to be up for any posthumous Parents of the Year awards, but their overall behavior seems somewhat inconsistent. The Martins did not seem to be close to the Beaubier family and there’s a strong implication that there were literally no other relations to take the twins, as no one came out of the woodwork to adopt Jeanne-Marie when the Martins couldn’t, to offer the family financial support to keep the twins together, or to take in Jean-Paul when the Martins died. That the Martins also separated the twins, with no effort to make them aware of each other’s existence and, ultimately, leaving the one not in their immediate vicinity to fall completely under the care of strangers, speaks of little thought to their long-term emotional welfare. And yet, if they had so little concern for Jean-Paul and Jeanne-Marie, it seems puzzling that they’d take any interest in them at all instead of leaving them to be adopted by another family. (Which likely would have been far better for the twins in the long term anyway.)However, if the whole business is taken as the Martin family viewing the twins as an inescapable moral obligation or even something specific as Christian duty (not out of the question given the religious make-up of Quebec), then their actions begin to make a bit more sense, particularly their treatment of Jeanne-Marie. Though we have no explicit explanation for why Louis Martin and his wife chose Jean-Paul over Jeanne-Marie, the fact that they not only elected to raise the boy of the pair themselves but sent the girl off to live with nuns as a charity case rather than leave her in a more secular organization to await adoption certainly has tones of the church’s repressive attitudes towards and general devaluing of women. It’s also worth noting that the Martin family’s lack of concern with regard keeping an eye on Jeanne-Marie could well signify not just a lack of concern with her overall welfare, but approval of the strict methods used at Madame Dupont’s.Meanwhile, we have Jean-Paul, the one lucky enough to be adopted, going to live with strangers who not only likely didn’t want him in the first place, but who well might have felt some resentment at his intrusion into their lives. Since the entire reason that the Martins split up the twins in the first place was because they couldn’t afford to take in two children, Jean-Paul’s presence in the Martin household meant that not only was he an unexpected financial burden, any plans the Martins would have had so far as children of their own had to be put on hold. So despite the difference in their circumstances, it seems that both twins wound up in situations where they were tolerated rather than loved.Going with this supposition, Jean-Paul would have spent his first six years in a home environment where the emotional climate ranged from cool to indifferent. While it seems unlikely that the Martins would have ever let him go hungry or materially neglected, it seems equally unlikely that affection and praise were easily forthcoming. Given that, it’s no great wonder that Jean-Paul had little attachment to whatever memories he had left of the Martin family. But what of after? More specifically, why was he never adopted once they were out of the picture?While six is, unfortunately, within the age range where children start becoming less desirable candidates for adoption, Jean-Paul still had a lot going for him. He was a white, able-bodied boy. He was also the tragically orphaned son of a member of the RCMP, not a child that had been removed from an abusive or neglectful situation by protective services, and there were no living family members who might turn up to contest an adoption.Likely, then, the issue was less Jean-Paul’s circumstances, than it was Jean-Paul himself. Here was a child who already would have had difficulty forming bonds left trying to cope with the trauma of everything familiar having just been torn away from him (and potentially with physical trauma to match the emotional if he was actually involved in the collision that killed his parents). Finding himself among unfamiliar caretakers after all of that would likely have lead to acting out, and given Jean-Paul’s personality, odds are good that came in the form of extreme willfulness as he tried to exert some control over his circumstances, if not outright hostility to those around him. As an undemonstrative, belligerent child, Jean-Paul’s opportunities for being adopted into a permanent family would have been slim and only decreased as he got older.At some point prior to his fourteenth birthday (Mantlo’s one contribution to this endeavor), Jean-Paul fled foster care and lived as a runaway before meeting Raymonde Belmonde, but other than that, his life after the Martins is entirely unexplored. Though his origin story mentions only a single foster home, it seems more likely that it was the first of several. Even setting aside the speculation about how trying a child Jean-Paul could have been to keep on long-term, a single family that was part of his life for as long or longer than the Martins would merit a mention somewhere in Jean-Paul’s past. Given that nothing of the sort ever comes up, it the alternative is that he passed through several foster homes that either made little impression or that he doesn’t recall fondly enough to want to mention.In that light, the reason for Jean-Paul keeping the Martin name once he was independent and famous, despite his lack of attachment to it, makes more sense: it was all he had. From his point of view, his life had been a parade of people who left him, gave him up, or just plain didn’t want him. The name might have had no positive associations, but it was his and no one could make him give it up or leave it behind…until he learned that no, that was a lie too. The Beaubier name would have been a way to easily shed the memory of a past where he was so little valued, a fresh start that didn’t actually require any additional sacrifice on his part.The big exception to that unhappy past, is of course, Raymonde Belmonde, and since that’s going to take more than few scans to illustrate, it will (eventually) be covered in a second part…