It's The 40th Anniversary of FBorFW!

Lynn Johnston created For Better or For Worse in 1979, after being offered a 20 year contract by Universal Press Syndicate (now known as Andrews McMeel Syndication), who wanted to showcase family life from a woman’s point of view. The first strip was published on Sunday, September 9th; it was only loosely based on Lynn’s own family, but over the years FBorFW grew to accurately reflect family life across North America – in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

In 2008, Lynn wrapped up the For Better or For Worse saga, which included hundreds of characters and storylines, spanned two generations of the Patterson family, and saw Lynn awarded the Order of Canada, a Reuben Award, and a Gemini award (for an animated special based on the strip), and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

This fall marks the 40th anniversary of For Better or For Worse, and to celebrate we’re rolling out contests and new website content, to thank our longtime readers – and welcome our new ones! Watch our site for updates throughout the year.

Contest: Photograph Yourself in FBorFW Locations:

The Pattersons live in Milborough, Ontario (based on Burlington, Ontario), but over the 30-year run of For Better or For Worse®, they travelled to places near and far. For the 40th anniversary of the strip, we're holding a photo contest to celebrate their voyages! Take a picture of yourself in any of the locations listed here and send us your photos. We'll pick a winner at the end of April; Lynn will draw the winner as an FBorFW character!

New Website Features

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the strip, we're rolling out some new website features throughout the year. Keep an eye on our News Blog for more, or read on to see what we've done so far.

Deep Dive: Explore the FBorFW Archives

In 2014, Lynn’s crew tackled the enormous job of organizing, cataloguing, and carefully storing her career-long collection of artwork (see our blog feature on the process, and what we learned). We knew there were more than 10,000 comic strips, but we also estimated that Lynn has created more than 25,000 other pieces of artwork. On top of this, there were hundreds of photographs, media articles, press kits, and other documentation.

Many of these pieces got scanned and stored in a digital archive, and we thought it was time to pull out some interesting items, show them to Lynn, and ask her to tell us the stories behind them. Here’s the first instalment of our new Deep Dive feature, with more to come!

Strip Fix

The first new project we released this year was our revamped Strip Catalog, where you can read the entire 40-year run of FBorFW from start to finish. Explore the whole cast of characters, browse by location, call up a random strip, or look in the right sidebar for other ways to explore!

Easter Is In The Air!

Be sure to check out our Fun Stuff page for all our Easter and Spring games!
 

Spring Deal! – 20% Off Your Order


Use this link during the month of April to get 20% off your order in our shop

You may also just use the coupon code SPRINGNEWS2019 at the checkout.