I feel a disturbance in the force, like a great many souls cried out at once

[burnunit]

I actually have feelings about the comics page, though I normally keep them close to the vest. But man, I have been reading For Better or For Worse for about 20 years. No really. I've been with that strip for a long long time and I know the characters pretty well. This long slow grinding death of one of the steady things in my reading-life horrifies me (Oh, and yes, I'm familiar with and read binky_betsy's foobiverse journal and generally agree with everything there). It is disgusting; it is manipulative; and it is embarrassing the way Lynn has ruined her comic the last several years, and doubly so as the pace picks up in anticipation of her retirement this year. The gears of these plots are simultaneously lost in murky clouds of black dust thrown off by all the grinding and mashing together by their author, and awfully, awfully transparent to even the most cursory reader.

I picture in my mind Lynn, seated on Vecna's throne, his terrible hand stitched in place of her own, his piercing eye wandering across the pencils and pens of her drawing board. Nearby, the blood of innocents fills vast inkwells and the sound of men being flayed alive hangs in the air.

This vision alone explains the choices she has been making to slouch the plots of this strip to its great, ineluctable conclusion. The woman is a lich and her child—the beloved comic of my youth and young adulthood!— has devolved into a rough beast, its hour coming around at last.