Please bow your heads as I prepare to give thanks for a blessing we have received for the last 29 years:

Lynn Johnston has officially ended her comic strip, "For Better or Worse" after 29 years. Beginning tomorrow she will return to the story's beginning and start again.  While I look forward to picking up some of the story lines I missed (I was 3 when the strip started and did not start to follow it until middle school) I am definitely going to miss the new material as it would have unfolded. Michael and I are roughly the same age and I have appreciated looking into his life as a married adult in addition to seeing how his parents view mostly adult children.

I ran into gaps during my college years where I didn't have access to much TV or a regular newspaper.  I walked in on the last days of Farley quite by accident and actually sought papers out during that time. I missed Elizabeth's high school years and Michael's courtship of his wife.  I know the family was kind to several of Michael's friends as they wobbled out into the adult world and this will always earn my loyalty, but I know this mostly from wikipedia articles. I discovered one could read comic strips on yahoo and so have been following the strip daily again for the last several years.  Along with 9 Chickweed lane, which first caught my attention because it was originally set in NH, these are the only two comics I follow.  I drop in on Get Fuzzy, Close to Home (read Farside version 2.o), and Pearls B just on occasion.

Some of my favorite story lines of the last year were the love and respect shown to Jim after his most recent stroke.  Lynn Johnston ended her final "new" strip by giving us all a blurb about each character's life after the wedding.  I started getting the "uh oh moist eyes gonna start to choke up a little now" feeling as we learn that Jim lives to see Elizabeth's first child.  I'm glad to know what happens to this family - I like the little blurbs you get about character's at the end of TV shows and movies, although I don't always like getting this info in books. (Harry Potter was a particular disappointment as I had looked forward to wondering what followed the final battle at Hogwarts for the rest of my life, just as I will spend the rest of my life wondering about Will and Lyra.).

I am a bit ambivalent about Johnston's plans for the future, "If I could do it all over again...would I do some things differently?...I've been given the chance to find out."  Robin McKinley's Beauty was a perfect story to me.  Years later she published Rose Daughter, a re-visioning of Beauty. I think redoing a story is interesting more for the author and the readers who look at them analytically. The part of me that is not analytical, who is just the fan up to her elbows in a beloved story with cherished characters, usually doesn't enjoy the re-visioned work.  I will probably buy Midnight Sun, by Stephenie Meyer when it is published but since it is the first novel written from a different main character's point of view I am not as excited about it as I would be for new material.  My main interest will be curiosity of the analytical kind, particularly since I'm interested in seeing if the writing continues to mature.

I printed the final comic on my fancy new printer - it will go into a frame and onto the wall, for inspiration and as a momento. So much of my life paralleled the kid's lives it will serve as tribute to a fabulous storyteller but also as a sentimental artifact.  It has earned its place in my library right next to the McKinleys, Lackeys, Brysons, Marilliers, Nixes, Shinns, Rowlings, Pullmans, Harrises, Homers, and the countless other authors who might be represented by a single piece of work but have caught me with that single work.