We have a For Better Of For Worse update.
The strip isn't going away, but Johnston is scaling back. Next month, she will start running older material, which will occasionally be interspersed with new strips. She eases into it beginning today as older daughter Elizabeth, just reunited with her old high-school flame Anthony, reminisces with a friend in flashbacks about how Anthony went through a bad marriage and now is divorced.
"I'm looking at this as a real challenge so that I can have some time," Johnston said from her studio in Corbeil, Ontario. " ... I'm 60 and I want to travel and there's other things I want to do."
As a result, the characters, who have aged in real time over the past three decades -- a rarity in the comic-strip world - will put the brakes on the advancing years. They all will stay the same age they are now.
So that's it, the Pattersons will no longer age. For as long as I can remember, they've been ageing as I've aged, and now they'll be frozen in time. I'm surprised at how this little thing saddens me.
What maddens me is the recent focus on Elizabeth and Anthony. We saw this coming a mile away and now Lynn Johnston is driving this syrupy drivel home full throttle in every panel.
It's still the best damn comic strip out there.
