Peter and Company actually began in 1998 as a zany Slice of Life, with many of the original comic's characters were either reworked into the reboot or simply retconned. Due to Jon deleting all traces of the original comic, most people only know of the second comic and commonly see it as the original despite it technically being a reboot. The author actually prefers to keep the original strips separate from the Guardian version, so this page will not include any details regarding the original series, as to avoid confusion for the vast majority of readers who are only familiar with the final official published version.
The comic is a joint project — Jonathan and his wife Whitney are both artists, having met at SCAD (the Savannah College of Art and Design). They both tackle the writing together, and then while Jonathan draws and inks the lineart (traditionally with pencil and brush ink), Whitney handles all the coloring duties digitally.
An animated pilot episode based on this webcomic is being developed, which was successfully funded via Kickstarter. As of May 2024, it was in the midst of the storyboarding phase, with the majority of voice work having been completed and ready for the animatic.
Although Peter & Company is listed as semi-autobiographical, many story elements are completely fictional. One major point is the fact that Whitney appears during Peter's childhood — In reality, Jonathan and Whitney only met in college. She was added as a character to the comic (per Jonathan's idea) in order to give Peter a specific love interest in the series. In this regard, she takes the place of any girls that Jonathan liked while growing up, for the purposes of retelling the stories from his childhood.
Trivia Tropes:
Bury Your Art: The original run of Peter & Company began as a simply-drawn newspaper-style comic strip, which Jonathan began drawing during his junior year of high school in 1998. After six years, in late 2004, he realized he had hit a brick wall in terms of ideas to use for the comic, and decided to do a full reboot with a completely different story concept. Deciding to make the story autobiographical, the new Peter & Company was launched with the "Guardian" story on January 1, 2005, and the entirety of the old series — all comics, artwork and 75% of the cast — were effectively deleted from existence, across all of his websites and galleries, such as Fur Affinity and Deviant Art. These comics still remain archived in his own collection, and he may decide to release them at a later date, but for now, he prefers that people focus on the story that the comic has grown into over the decades that he has been working on it.
Jon himself states on strip 73 of the comic that the School Counselor, a character introduced in the comic during 2006 based on his actual counselor from his childhood, was originally set to become a villain of the story who severed the bonds between guardians and their chosen kids, but he ultimately decided against it as he felt the comic didn't need a dedicated villain or an evil counterpart to the guardians.
On strip 200, Chelsea was intended to have another antagonist arc which would've brought back Dr. Victor and Dr. Fritz for a third chapter, where she would have handed them her findings on Peter and Seth. However, in 2023, Jon explained on the page itself that he decided to scrap the entire arc, since he couldn't find a feasible scenario as to why Chelsea would even do it or why the two doctors would pick her to assist them, knowing that any reason he came up with would seem out of the blue. He had also come to realize the fact that the two doctors did not at all fit the genre he had intended his comic to be, so he decided to remove them from the comic for good.
The author has stated both on his comic and elsewhere that Tracy was actually his wife's friend who willingly agreed to be put in the comic as a stand-in character, taking the place of an unpleasant classmate that Jon had to deal with in a class assignment.
Write What You Know: The commentary on each page reveals that the comic is semi-autobiographical; while the artist claims that he did not have an imaginary friend growing up, the majority of situations that Peter finds himself in are directly based on events that did happen to him, with fictional events thrown in the mix.
Write Who You Know: Most of the characters in the comic are based on individuals whom Jonathan knew in real life while growing up. Iggy, in particular, is actually a mix of three separate friends that Jonathan had throughout his childhood, and he takes the place of whichever friend was with him when a given story took place.
