The Continuing Legacy of For Better or For Worse

I’ve spent the last couple of days reading through comments on the last few years of the seemingly-eternal Canadian comic strip For Better or For Worse at The Comics Curmudgeon. In doing so, I’ve learned a whole lot about the changes the daily strip has gone through since I last regularly paid attention to it. (Which was around the time Farley died. I was depressed for a week.)

Here’s what I was able to gather:

• Series creator Lynn Johnston, is pretty much completely out of touch at this point, insofar as nothing really makes sense. Once known for her realistic dialogue and story lines, Johnston is now perfectly content making up new teenage slang that no one would ever use.
• Due to unfortunate health problems and a desire to settle down in her elder years, Johnston has changed the strip’s format — things no longer progress in real-time, and much of the strips are now taken up by flashbacks (reruns of old art).
• Continuing on that last point, she’s also going through a divorce from her long-time husband, Rod, who is the basis for the John Patterson character in the comic. This has led, perhaps coincidentally, to most of the flashbacks we’ve seen so far depicting John as a dim-witted shell of a character, who never really contributed anything to heroine Ellie’s life in any meaningful way.
• As her own marriage falls apart, Johnston has taken on an almost pathological desire to put together daughter-character Elizabeth with creepy-mustache-guy Anthony, to the point that her story lines have taken on an entirely illogical quality as she works to revert these characters to their teenagers-in-love status.
• Her son, who has written perhaps the the worst novel ever — about, again perhaps coincidentally, a woman who marries a “ruthlessly cruel and controlling man” — has taken on a saintly quality in the strips, where Johnston frequently attempts to portray him as the awesomest guy ever, even though he doesn’t seem to like his wife or children very much.
• Johnston has apparently taken much of her frustration out on the Grandpa Jim character, who seems to be cursed with immortality, forever having strokes but not dying. He is now unable to speak but continues to think lucidly (much like the guy in Metallica’s “One” video) — his one consolation is his frequently vivid fantasy sequences in which he hits on teenage girls.

All that said, here are the most ridiculous For Better or For Worse strips to come during Johnston’s long, hard road into madness.