For Worse!

So Lynn Johnston is making some type of move to fulfill the idea she raised several years ago, to end "For Better or For Worse". Although the article is kind of vague, but she appears to have reached a point where the characters will go into stasis.

Although I lost interst in the Patterson clan years ago (I never got over the death of Farley) this strip was a lot better than most of the garbage that appears in the comics today. It had an evolving story, althought the plots got blander and the resolutions more predictable over time. But it never devolved into an endless recycling of unfunny gags that strips like Hagar the Horrible, Tiger, and The Born Loser do day after day. Who can read that stuff? Maybe that's the real reason newspaper circulation is dropping.

The comic strip is in serious decline. Old comic strips calcify, and editors are hesitant to remove them. A trend has developed in "ethnic" strips where the race or national origin of a character is supposed to be essential to the strip (Baldo, Candorville). But these "progressive" strips never seem to capture anything related to the culture they come from, they recycle the same stale gags other strips do, and think throwing in a reference to "Sabado Gigante" is supposed to justify their space on the comics page. At the bottom of the pile is "Mutts", an ugly-looking, monotonous strips that centers around the fact that cats like to sleep and eat, and dogs sometime chase things.

The only thing that ever seems to draw attention to the comics is when a cartoonist does something mildy controversial, like suggest that Condoleeza Rice needs to find a man. Then strips get slammed for trying something modern, and everyone bemoans the fact that the children who read the strips had to deal with a real-world issue. But considering how outdated comics are, what kid would be interested in reading them?