For Better, For Worse, For Ever

Not a big fan of the strip, but this is worth noting for its implications for the newspaper comics business. Lynn Johnston is retiring from writing For Better or For Worse, her long running strip that chronicles the Patterson family and which, unusually for comics, had the characters age almost on par with the real-world calendar. (Gasoline Alley is the only other strip I can think of where characters grew up, grew old, and spawned new generations of characters.)

Although Johnston won't be writing much new material, she will be producing some framing strips to introduce story lines from the first decade of the comic. And her characters will stop aging.

Q: Traditionally, cartoonists who wanted to retire from the daily grind of newspaper strips had two options: hand their creation over to another cartoonist [what’s called a “legacy strip”] or quit and take the strip down with you, the choice of Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and Gary Larson (The Far Side). Why not follow their lead?

A: Initially that was my plan, and I had sort of speculated on what type of work would fill that space, because that little piece of real estate in the newspaper is a pretty coveted one. Then when Universal Press [her syndicate] said that they felt there was real opportunity to run the older strips, I thought about it and decided that their argument was a good one. Because there were many, many papers that did not pick up the strip in the first 10 years, so in a lot of markets those first 10 years were never seen.

But then there were other editors, like at the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, the Chicago Tribune, who have been wonderful supporters right from Day 1, and I didn’t want to sell those editors the same material without adding something new. So that was my thinking. It would not only give me the satisfaction of still being in touch with the characters, but I would also be providing some new material for the editors and readers.

This is an interesting compromise, and probably a good one from the perspective of Johnston, her syndicate, the newspapers, and her fans. Not so good for cartoonists looking for a chance to break into newsprint. There's only so much space for comics, and it's shrinking all the time.