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Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Goodbye...soon
I admit it. I'm a geek for comic strips. Growing up I was a avid reader of comic books: Classics Illustrated, Batman, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, Flash, Green Lantern, all kinds. I wasn't a collector, I was a reader. I moved on to the little paperbacks of Peanuts, BC (back when it was funny), Tumbleweeds, and The Wizard of ID. As I hit high school it was Doonesbury strips and the books that soon followed. Then there was the late great Bloom County, taken from us too soon. But I have always read the comic strips in the paper. From the greatest of them all, Calvin and Hobbes, to the high school bizarro-world of Gil Thorpe (which is now too painful to even glance at these days). These days popular favorites like Dilbert, Baby Blues, and Foxtrot mix with more obscure regional favorites like Sherman's Lagoon, Pooch Cafe (I luv Pooch Cafe), and The Duplex. Hell, I even read Family Circus even though it makes me cringe and causes my eyes to bleed. Comic strips are the comfort food of reading. They make us laugh, they make us put them up on the refrigerator or on a cubicle wall, and sometimes they even make us think about our lives and our family and what is is to grow up and to grow old.
Which brings me to this report of the imminent demise of a strip that has done all of the good things that I believe that the creator set out to do: For Better or for Worse.
She was raised in British Columbia, where her parents ran a jewelry store. Her mother "should have been a career woman," Johnston said, while her father was the more gregarious of the two and found it easier to deal with children. "You couldn't have put two more unlikely individuals together, yet they were devoted to each other." They died only a few months apart.
"I respected my parents. They were talented, resourceful and kind," Johnston said, yet they were two people whom she "didn't really love."
Contrast that with Johnston's loving but realistic portraits of the Patterson family — Elly, John and their kids Michael, Elizabeth and April — and their extended circle of friends and relations. Her humorous, often touching style has struck a chord with millions of readers. "For Better or for Worse" appears in more than 2,000 newspapers worldwide, including The Seattle Times, and is translated into several languages.
But the end is near for the 24-year-old strip. Well, maybe not "near," but in sight. Johnston plans to end the strip in four years, when her contract with distribution syndicate United Media runs out. She then intends to write a book to tie up the loose ends and reveal what happens to her characters.
"I'm ready to wrap up the strip and end it because all things come to an end," Johnston said in a phone interview. She also wants to avoid dealing with production deadlines when she's in her 60s.
Unlike many strips, the characters in FBFW have grown up (no arrested development like Family Circus, here), they have had parents and pets pass away, children move out and start families of their own. The main characters have grown older and have shown us that you never stop having growing pains; that they are a permanent condition of life. A teenaged boy came out...and was rejected by his mother. A daughter has her heart broken. A lonely widower moves in with a widow and starts a new life. In FBFW things happen like that, life is lived and time rushes by.
That's why I love For Better or For Worse, and I'm going to miss it when it goes away, probably in a lot of the same ways that the Patterson's miss their beloved dog Farley; because he had become an indispensable part of the family.
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