What Is For Better or For Worse?
For Better or For Worse is a Canadian comic strip created by Lynn Johnston, which launched through Universal Press Syndicate on September 9, 1979. It is a family slice-of-life strip centered on the Pattersons, a middle-class household in suburban Ontario. What set it apart from nearly every other strip on the page was its commitment to real time: instead of freezing its cast at a convenient age, Johnston let the children grow up, the adults grow older, and the family change permanently. Johnston won the Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year in 1985 — the first woman ever to receive the National Cartoonists Society's top honor — and at its peak the strip ran in well over 2,000 newspapers worldwide.
A Family in Real Time: The Timeline
Because the Pattersons aged with their readers, For Better or For Worse reads less like a gag strip and more like a decades-long family novel told four panels at a time. The arc breaks roughly into eras.
1979–1985: The young household
The strip opens with Elly and John Patterson raising rambunctious preschooler Michael and toddler Elizabeth, with the sheepdog Farley underfoot. The early years lean on the comedy of exhausted young parenthood.
1986–1992: Growing up
Michael becomes a wisecracking adolescent and Elizabeth a schoolkid. Youngest child April is born in 1991, restarting the baby years just as the older two hit their teens — a deliberate move that kept the family's age range wide.
1993–2000: Teen years and turning points
The Patterson kids move through high school, first jobs, and first heartbreaks. This is the era of the strip's most talked-about storylines, when Johnston used the aging cast to tackle subjects most strips avoided.
2001–2008: Adulthood and the finale
Michael marries his childhood crush Deanna and becomes a father and a writer; Elizabeth becomes a teacher and marries Anthony Caine. The original daily run ended August 30, 2008, with a Sunday epilogue the next day wrapping up the family's future.
The Storylines That Made Headlines
Real-time aging gave Johnston something a frozen-timeline strip never has: stakes. Two arcs in particular broke out of the comics page and into the news. In April 1993, Michael's best friend Lawrence came out as gay — one of the first openly gay characters in a mainstream syndicated strip — and the storyline was controversial enough that more than 100 newspapers either pulled those strips or ran replacements. Two years later, in 1995, the family dog Farley died of a heart attack after rescuing young April from a river; the death generated roughly 2,500 reader letters. Quieter long arcs — Michael and Deanna, Elizabeth and Anthony — paid off precisely because readers had watched those characters since they were children.
The New-Runs Experiment and Where to Read It Today
Rather than hand the strip to another artist or simply stop, Johnston tried something unusual when the original run ended in 2008. Beginning September 1, 2008, she launched new-runs: a hybrid that mixed straight reprints with reworked 1980s strips carrying new or altered dialogue, weaving fresh framing around the classic material. That format ran about 22 months before the strip settled into straight reruns in July 2010. Today For Better or For Worse runs as reruns on GoComics, where you can follow the Patterson saga from its 1979 beginning, and it still appears in newspapers around the world.
What For Better or For Worse Teaches About Long-Form Comics
For Better or For Worse is the clearest proof that a comic can carry a multi-decade story if two things hold: continuity and consistency. Continuity is the willingness to let events stick — a death, a wedding, a kid leaving for college — so that the strip accumulates history instead of resetting. Consistency is the harder craft problem: a character has to stay recognizably themselves across thousands of installments even as they visibly age. That combination — a fixed family ensemble carried forward through a real timeline — is exactly the territory the comic in Luann also works in, and it is what AI tools now make approachable for a solo creator. With a comic series generator you can carry a cast forward across chapters, and a comic character creator lets you lock a character's look so they stay on-model from the first strip to the hundredth.