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"For Better Or For Worse" Wraps It Up
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"For Better or For Worse" wrapped up about, what, nearly three decades' worth of comic stripping on Sunday, by letting characters Elizabeth and Anthony get married and telling us the fates of most of the other Pattersons. I would have liked to hear about some of ancillary folks - like that helicopter-pilot dude who kept trying to make time with Elizabeth only to fly out of there at a moment's notice. Or Deanna's awful mother. But you take what you can get.
Now the experimenting begins. Creator Lynn Johnson had long expressed a desire to work less, and now she's going to run the entire strip again - from the beginning - but inject new material here and there. I maintain the Pattersons had an older sister somewhere in the mix, but maybe I remember these things incorrectly.
More important is whether Johnston's gambit will entice comic-pages readers - and the newspaper editors who try to satisfy them. After all, there are plenty of new, hungry cartoonists who would like to have Johnston's spot. Some papers run "classic" versions of comic strips like "Peanuts" - I call them repeats. Others see nothing wrong with running strips that have been taken over by somebody other than the founder. I maintain this results in watered-down cartooning that is often bland and runs on auto-pilot. (The Washington Post has already moved the strip out of the paper and on to the Web.) If Johnson can maintain enough of a presence in this run of repeats, she just might come up with a viable way to keep her material in front of the public, and a model for other veteran comics creators to follow.
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