In all honesty, we don’t follow FOR BETTER OR WORSE, so we’ve been letting others tell the story of its move to a “hybrid” but this E&P story reveals that many of the changes in the strip have been due to the state of creator Lynn Johnston’s own real life marriage, which ended in April when her husband left her for another woman. Johnston is handling the break-up and answering questions about (what else) Elizabeth and Anthony!
The Universal creator has received some criticism from people such as cartoon bloggers for bringing Elizabeth and Anthony back together. Some said Johnston already did the school-sweethearts-reunite theme with Michael and Deanna, while others said Anthony — a nice guy and devoted father to the child from his disastrous first marriage — is supposedly not interesting enough for Elizabeth.
Johnston said she reunited Elizabeth with Anthony partly because of advice from late “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. “‘Sparky’ accused me of having too many characters,” she recalled with a chuckle. “‘It’s so confusing,’ he said. He was right.” So bringing back Anthony rather than introducing a new permanent love interest for Elizabeth made sense in that respect.
It is sad to read about Lynn and Rod’s breakup. Sharon and I got to travel to Japan with them in 1998, and they seemed made for each other.
As she herself said, there is at least one bright spot in the breakup–she will be doing more new work on FBoW.
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