From The Comics Journal 149, March 1992

For Worse

Lynn Johnston said she included a domestic violence story in For Better or For Worse because "if you don't include this sort of thing, you're not including life the way it is." In the key episodes of the January-February storyline, a neighbor boy to the starring Patterson family shows up in school with suspicious facial bruises and refuses to talk about them. Johnston told the Newhouse News Service that she wanted to depict the effects of child-beating as a part of everyday life that mustn't be ignored: "There are times when a family handles things the wrong way. They don't sit down and analyze things, they just blow up." Universal Press Syndicate reported getting "only a few phone calls" from readers objecting to the change of pace from the strip's normally light tone.