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It's Finally Over

Today marks the last strip of Lynn Johnson's For Better or For Worse. It ended more or less as predicted, with the wedding of Elizabeth Patterson and Anthony Caine (or, as us FOOB-haters prefer to call him, "Blandthony") and spadefuls of hokey dialogue, not to mention bad puns. Over at the Comics Curmudgeon site the commenters have been weighing in like mad, mainly to indicate their disgust with the feeble ending and to state that they're glad the strip has come to an end.

Only it hasn't.

Johnson is restarting it; that is to say, she's going back to the beginning of the strip and redrawing it. Yes, she's telling the whole damn saga all over again. You can imagine how the FOOB-haters feel about that: Apparently, our venom has been significant enough to garner national notice, as witness this article. I'm so proud of my fellow snarkers.

I myself find this an odd decision. Johnson announced her decision to retire over a year ago, at which time she made the decision to end the strip. Sadly, her marriage ended right after that. I can understand her changing her mind, but in that case why not continue with an ongoing story? Putting yourself into your work is supposed to be therapeutic, but merely redrawing strips without new storylines doesn't sound very satisfying to me.

My favorite comment on all this was the following, from the CC site:

"My strip is gone"

cried Lynn the hack.

"But look - surprise!

It's coming back!"

Burma Shave

Labels: Comix

posted by Dr. Alice at #