I'm Going to Miss This Comic

There are a lot of great webcomics out there and I read and enjoy a lot of them. Traditional comics, like newspapers themselves seem to be a dying breed. When referenced at all by Gen-xers, it's usually as an ironic punch-line. I get it, I really do.

I grew up in a different time, reading my local newspaper and it's comics that included, Peanuts, The Lock Horns, Hagar, The Phantom and Ziggy. In 1981, for whatever reason, I discovered For Better of For Worse. Launched in 1979, FBorFW had simple stories about a young Canadian family known as the Patterson's. Set in and around the fictional town of Milborough, a suburb of Toronto, each strip featured simply, but elegantly drawn facets of suburban life. Around the time I started reading it as a teen, a baby was born into the family, Elizabeth.

Well today, the Strips' creator, Lynn Johnson is saying goodbye to the Pattersons. There will be more. Starting Monday, she's beginning the first retcon of a comic strip ever. Comic books have been doing it for Forty-years, but Lynn feels she wants to go back to the beginning and recreate the family as it was. She believes it became too complicated, convoluted and grounded in reality. Stories became complex and controversial and could sometimes span weeks or even months. The cast of regulars expanded to dozens. This all probably came from her decision early on that the family would age. The kids grew up right in front of our eyes and like all children, they developed their own lives, friends and loves. In the retcon FBorFW, the family won't age.

So here I am, in my early 40s now and the baby I saw born in 1981 just got married and all the Patterson's will live and have children and thrive, just beyond our perception. It was one of the all-time great strips and like her friend and mentor, Charles M. Schultz, she knew that if you create characters people love and care about, the rest, as they say is history. So long and thanks for the memories.

Sometimes on here, I'm much more serious than I am in RL. So to throw a little of my two favorite things at ya. Zombies and satire, here's The ending of FBorFW in the Mirror Universe, courtesy medium-large.com.