Meandering Thoughts: An Appreciation of "For Better or For Worse"

One of the many cultural benefits of growing up in New York City, aside from its myriad museums and artistic happenings, is the access that I had to many different sources of media. It seems almost incongruous now, given our current culture of information available on-demand whenever and wherever, but when I was growing up, I had access to a number of newspapers for a constant stream of information. Every Sunday, after church, you could stop by the corner store and pick up any one of a number of newspapers, from the highbrow New York Times to the lowbrow New York Post to the Spanish-language El Diario.

My favorite, growing up, was the New York Daily News. It wasn't intimidatingly massive like the Times, or in a language I don't understand like either the Post or El Diario. It was reliable - a great sports section, relatively-unbiased news. Most importantly, though, it had an awesome comics section - a pull-away 12+ page section on Sundays, and 3 to 4 pages of daily strips on the other days of the week.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the comics of my childhood. When I was young, my favorites were always the cartoons that didn't talk down to me. Calvin and Hobbes was unrelenting in its quest to bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood, and as such, a constant favorite. I appreciated the life-is-somewhat-dismal outlook of Charles Schultz's finest Peanuts moments. I always read strips like Doonesbury and Bloom County, as well. The one other favorite of mine? Oddly enough, it was the relatively-saccharine For Better or For Worse.

I can't tell you why I took to For Better or For Worse. The strip has always seemed like it was aimed towards the generation two ahead of mine; while it's readily featured three young characters, who have aged in real-time since the strip's inception in 1979, it's a cartoon that, like Doonesbury, is ultimately by a baby-boomer for an audience of baby-boomers. I guess I've always been appreciative of author/cartoonist Lynne Johnston's no-frills approach; where strips like Doonesbury and Bloom County diverted easily and often into the political, For Better or For Worse did a pretty phenomenal job of maintaining an intimate, personal point of view. There wasn't any political commentary, nor was there too much angst. The strip maintained a point of view for a great amount of time without getting too jokey or too flashy; it tackled a lot of capital-i issues (one character had a severe stroke, and another one fended off a possible sexual assault) without being too preachy. Everything that was done over the span of For Better or For Worse was done with a certain grace; this is not to say that the strip always succeeded (like many other strips, the author obviously struggled to write about adolescence and youth from her adult perspective), but it maintained a real dignity.

Recently, For Better or For Worse author Lynne Johnston announced her retirement. According to media reports, she's decided to phase out the strip gracefully - rather than wrap it up right now, she's going to use the next few months to create a "hybrid comic" where she'll use a flashback format to look back at the strip's original days before signing off sometime in the new year. Good for her. It's a plus to see a strip like this go out on its own terms, rather than see it taken over by a media conglomerate and farmed out. It might not be the hippest, edgiest strip, but it's always come from a singular point of view. I'm glad it's going to maintain that to the end.

I'm not really a constant visitor to the comics page anymore - I haven't been, really, since I stopped commuting in to work in New York City and stopped reading the New York Daily News on a regular basis - but, weirdly, I'll miss For Better or For Worse. It's another piece of my childhood - my strange, quirky, different childhood - that's disappearing. I can only wish it well.