Lynn Johnston has finished her comic strip “For Better Or For Worse.” It’s now a somewhat ironic title, given that Lynn and her husband are divorcing, but she didn’t call the strip “Till Death Do Us Part.”
I enjoyed FBOFW very much for a long time, but my interest petered out towards the end. Eric hit the spot when he described it as having turned into a “chicken soup for the soul sort of thing.”
Johnston belongs to what I believe is pretty much the last generation of syndicated newspaper comic strip creators. For better or for worse, the great, grand age of print media is over, having been replaced by electronic media.
I scanned the last daily and Sunday installments of FBOFW from the Boston Globe. I for one still get home delivered newspapers, but I have to admit I don’t jump on them right away like I used to, because I get most of my news online and from NPR.
Johnston owes something to Sparky Schulz, and she has expressed that gratitude elsewhere, but it would have been nice for her to acknowledge it in her last Sunday panel.
Now that she has “tied up the loose ends,” I hope that Johnston doesn’t change her mind like Berke Breathed did with “Outland” and “Opus.” Once you SAY you are going to do something, it’s best to stick with it! Breathed had a perfectly lovely ending to “Outland,” where Opus finally reunited with his mother, but then ruined it by later starting up “Opus” that was too weird even for my tastes.
I imagine Lynn is including Sparky in with with all the others in that last panel. To her, the readers are the most important part of her “family.” Unlike Sparky, she has others working for her to do inking and coloring, etc.