In 1991, my mother came to visit my family in Tallahassee. The first words out of her mouth were, “Elly had her baby!” An outside observer might have thought she was talking about a mutual family friend or a relative. But she was talking about Elly Patterson, protagonist and centerpiece of the newspaper comic strip For Better or For Worse. So familiar and so much a part of our lives had the Patterson family become — not only to our family but to families all over the world — that it seemed just as natural to join in celebrating the birth of April Patterson as it did to mourn the death of the Patterson’s family dog, Farley, at a different point in the strip’s history.

Today the daily storyline of the Patterson family comes to end as Canadian cartoonist and creator of For Better of For Worse, Lynn Johnston, begins a new phase. I believe she had planned to retire altogether and the strip would run in repeats much like the late Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Classics. But Johnston instead decided to start from the beginning, re-telling the story of the Patterson family using her original, more simple drawing style (as she explains here, the current style had become too complex and required additional illustrators). She wanted to simplify. Here’s another article that explains what Johnston is doing.

As I sit here writing this, I feel tears welling up. I will truly miss the ongoing story, finding out what happens in the lives of the Pattersons. [Update: Johnston generously filled this need to know “what happens next” in her Sunday strip on Aug. 31, 2008.] On the other hand, I don’t think I started reading the strip until the two older children, Michael and Elizabeth, were preteens, so I’m looking forward to learning more of the backstory.

I also want to thank Lynn Johnston for all the years of pleasure and peak emotional moments this compelling, engrossing, warm, family story has brought me and my family. I grew up on serialized comic strips — Brenda Starr, Winnie Winkle, Gasoline Alley, Rex Morgan, MD, Mary Worth — another early indication that stories are everything to me. Not many of them are still around, or at least they are not widely syndicated, and I miss them.

It is truly amazing how much of a touching, involving story can be conveyed in four panels in a daily newspaper. Thank you, Patterson Family, and thank you, Lynn.