Michael and his young family have settled into his parents'
old home, April is determined to become a veterinarian, and
Elizabeth appears likely to marry the childhood sweetheart with
whom she recently reconnected. Their parents, meanwhile, are
drifting into retirement.
But that may be where life for the Pattersons - characters
in For Better or For Worse, one of the nation's most beloved
comic strips - freezes in time.
After 28 years of growing up in real time, the Pattersons
have stopped aging. Their creator, Lynn Johnston, has dropped
one of the strip's groundbreaking characteristics. Instead of
aging, the characters will spend much of their time recalling
earlier adventures.
In what Johnston calls a "hybrid" format, she is reintroducing
the cartoons that started it all while wrapping up the few dangling
plot twists. Some of the old story lines will be expanded with
new material, and the present-day characters may face some new
situations, but they won't change physically.
That way, the Toronto-based artist, whose strip appears daily
in more than 2,000 newspapers in North America, can cut back
on her workload by having less to draw.
"Its a whole new experiment," says Johnston, 60, who has a
central hand tremor that makes drawing twice as time-consuming
as in earlier years. When she suggested retiring to her editors
at Universal Press Syndicate, "they felt the strip would do
well if it started again, if it ran in reruns again like Peanuts.
And I thought, 'Well, I'm still on the planet. I would still
like to keep my hand in it, and I would prefer to keep working
on it if there was a way to do that.' "
Industry watchers agree it's unprecedented. Rod Gilchrist,
executive director of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco,
says popular strips typically cease when their creators retire
them, as Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County did, or other artists
take over after the original cartoonist dies, as has been the
case for Blondie.
"This is a little bit different," Gilchrist says. "Normally,
I wouldn't care too much because these things come and go, but
this strip has been one of the better strips done in the last
30 years. … For fans, it's vastly better than her first thought
to retire completely."
Much like the storied tale of how a struggling J.K. Rowling
invented Harry Potter, Johnston started For Better or For Worse
to ward off poverty in the late 1970s when she relied on welfare.
The characters Elly and John were based on her and her husband,
and Michael and Elizabeth mirrored her real-life son and daughter.
April was the third child Johnston was unable to conceive in
real life.
Over the years, the cartoon's efforts to reflect real-life
situations made it an unlikely lightning rod for controversy,
most notably in 1993 when Michael's friend Lawrence came out
as gay, a story line inspired by the coming-out of her brother-in-law.
In some cases, newspapers stopped running the strip or requested
replacement material, but the story line earned her a Pulitzer
Prize nomination.
Johnston has been amazed at the intensity of interest over
the years - readers have sent in their dating prospects for
Michael, Elizabeth or even Grandpa Jim - and disheartened more
recently by harsh attacks by bloggers who analyze each frame
and complain that she's out of touch with how her own characters
would behave. She concedes that she's "quite out of the loop"
and that freezing the characters in time prevents her from "showing
my lack of connection."
Josh Fruhlinger, who blogs as The Comics Curmudgeon at joshreads.com,
says it's because many bloggers like him have grown up with
the strip that they get upset by parts of it that ring false.
"You're never going to see a million hate sites springing
up about Beetle Bailey because nobody cares about it that much,"
said Fruhlinger, 33, of Baltimore.
For years, the strip has topped reader surveys such as one
taken by the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2005. Part of the appeal,
says Review-Journal editor Thomas Mitchell, has been the realistic
aging of the Pattersons.
"It's an ongoing piece that evolves with time, while you've
been getting the same old Dagwood and Blondie for 50 years,"
Mitchell says. "We'll have to wait and see. Readers can lose
interest. Eventually, they all end."
The cartoonist says she hopes people enjoy the hybrid format,
but if not, she'll move on.
"The old stuff will eventually be running on its own because
I'm going to be old stuff, too," she says. "When that happens,
it happens. But it doesn't take long to know if (the hybrid)
isn't working because you start to lose papers. It's not just
the readers that write to you, it's the editors who say, 'You
know, this can be replaced.' If I'm not doing something that's
competitive and worthy, then I don't deserve that piece of real
estate."
