This post is being written using the WordPress editor for my WotG blog, and also appearing in my standard LJ. I hope.

So this is more than just a typical test post like the last one, I’ll actually talk about something that’s on my mind.

It appears that Lynn Johnston is ready to begin the “rerun/redraw” phase of For Better or For Worse’s life. As came out several months ago, the cartoonist, who has done this strip since 1979, was originally going to end the strip this year, but has instead decided to continue on with a combination of recycled stories from the past as well as some new material. That process has begun with this week’s strips, which as expected featured little Meredith Patterson discovering an old family album in the closet and being shown what her father and his sister were like when they were her age. (Meredith, nearing age 5, is now just about as old as daddy Michael was when the strip began.) The most controversial element of the new FBoFW, perhaps, was Johnston’s decision to stop the aging process for her characters; whereas the Pattersons had before lived their lives in more or less real time (an element Johnston admitted was not something she planned to do, it just sort of happened that way), they will now be frozen at their present ages.

It is that last element that I have problems with. To me, and I know I’m not alone in this, one of the things that made FBoFW such a unique strip was its realistic treatment of how people, especially children, grew and changed over time. I can think of no other comic strip, with the possible exception of Doonesbury (which is, as always, more of an editorial cartoon with recurring characters than a story strip), that has shown its characters go through the aging process quite so believably. The difference here is, Doonesbury would still be a bitingly satirical comic strip without the element of passing time. FBoFW, if you take that away, would become just another gag-a-day family sitcom, along the lines of dinosaurs such as Blondie or Hi and Lois, and the traditional newspaper comic world does not need another one of those. I guess I just wanted a strip that broke so much ground not to end up like that; I would have preferred it if Lynn had just stuck with her original plan to end the strip on a high note rather than see it turned into something… ordinary.

More later…