Cartoonist Lynn Johnston can’t bring herself to abandon her fictional family. For years, the “For Better or for Worse” creator mulled retirement, then lightened her workload by creating flashbacks and repurposing the archives of her popular comic. Finally, she knew she needed to conclude the Patterson family’s 29-year saga.

This Sunday’s cartoon is an adieu of sorts to readers, but not a final farewell. She announced this month that she would retell her strip’s narrative, beginning Monday, by taking her continually aging characters back to 1979, but creating new artwork and some dialogue. Her syndicate says it’s the first time a mainstream cartoonist has set out to tell the same story twice.

What the reflective Johnston, 60, realized was that after decades of her identity and creativity and livelihood being linked to a comic strip, she wasn’t ready to give it up.

“It’s in your blood – it’s part of your life. I don’t want to quit being a cartoonist,” Johnston says by phone from her Toronto studio. “It’s tough to put it down – you still think of gags. And at the same time, I knew I’d be looking at material that I’d want to improve.”

She will keep scrawling dialogue into a pad, keep inking her fluid lines, keep living in the intricate world of her characters. But this is not life as she would have drawn it up.

“I thought I would now be a retired woman with my Tilley hat and sitting on a cruise ship and going to the Galapagos,” Johnston says. But that was before the recent dissolution of her 32-year marriage to the man many readers chose to see as John Patterson’s inspiration and doppelgnger.

“I really wanted to be happy as a couple and make everything right, but things became more stressful. … It made me look again at my career.”

Which is why, on Sunday, the strip’s fans will read Johnston’s heartfelt salute as she comes to the endpoint of her characters’ lives. (In the final chapter, for example, the original Patterson kids, Michael and Elizabeth, will forever remain grown and married.)

And which is why, on Monday, the strip will time-travel back to 1979 and do it all over again, but with new drawings, new conversations, new wrinkles. (And in some cases, fewer wrinkles – John and Elly Patterson will return to parenting tykes.)

“It’s going back to the beginning when Michael and Elizabeth were very young,” Johnston says of the approach, which she is dubbing “new-runs.” “I’m going back to do it how it should have been done. … I’m beginning with all this knowledge, so it’s a much more comprehensive beginning. I only have an insular world of characters (from 1979) to work with.”

As far as Johnston knows, “new-runs” – in which a strip’s continual story line is retold – have never been attempted by a syndicated cartoonist (“Most people die or the strip ends,” she says).

“All of September will be brand-new material,” Johnston explains. “In October, it will be (a ratio of) 50-50. The color Sunday comics will be all-new material. … I think it will be 50-50 for the first year, at least.”

One question rippling its way through the industry is whether many newspaper editors will be willing to pay for “new-runs,” especially since the core story lines will remain the same. (The News Tribune hasn’t made a decision on whether to keep the strip.)

“The descriptive ‘new-runs’ was new to us, but it does hint at the blend of new and old that she’ll undertake,” says Lee Salem, Universal Press Syndicate’s president and editor. “It’s quite a gamble on her part, and much of this terrain will be new to her, too. Only time will tell if it’s effective or not.”

Johnston, whose strip is in more than 2,000 papers, has endured losing clients before, such as when a gay character, Lawrence, came out. Is she concerned about losing newspapers this time around?

As a cartoonist, “You know people are always going to drop your strip – that’s what editors do,” she says. “Blondie” cartoonist “Dean Young and I joke that we keep taking each other’s place (on the comics page). … If you write for editors so that they will keep your work, you’ll be losing clients and readers. It’s just part of it: I don’t want to lose papers, but I know that I will.”

Sounding energized, she characterizes this experiment as a way to create a better, livelier, funnier beginning to the strip. Call it the Old Adventures of the New Lynn Johnston.

“In this business, you’re a perfectionist – you’ve got to be,” she says. “My early work on the strip was freer, it was more spontaneous. But I want to combine the confidence and experience (I have now) with that freedom – that’s the best of all worlds.”

Johnston plays down some elements of her early work, but in the ’80s, “For Better or for Worse” soon found a commercial following and critical praise. She received the cartooning industry’s Reuben Award in 1985 for the strip, and nearly a decade later, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. And Universal Press Syndicate launched her feature at a time when women cartoonists were very few and far between on the funny pages.

Decades later, Johnston stands near the top of the syndication heap, which is why her ending of the current real-time stories is bound to disappoint her many readers worldwide. But the cartoonist speaks with conviction about this stopping point.

“The analogy would be like decorating a room: Once you’ve done everything you can do to it, you step back and (realize) you can’t do any more. … I wanted to stop the story while it was still a reasonably good story. You can’t fulfill everyone’s needs. I’ve told the story – I can’t do any more … to redecorate this room.”

Johnston sounds as upbeat as ever about producing the strip. She says she doesn’t even use it to take veiled digs at her ex-husband. Well, except once.

“The only thing I’ve put in the strip with a sarcastic streak toward my ex-husband is John (Patterson’s) potbelly, because my ex is very proud of his physique,” says Johnston before pausing, again sweetly reflective in her approach. “Perhaps I made up my own husband and saw John Patterson in my husband.”

She says she feels 30 years old again while drawing it and relishes the joy that comes from returning to the comic’s roots – to a time when she herself was still newly married, raising small children and discovering her full talent through a newborn strip.

“It’s going to be the best work I can possibly do. . … It’s going to be a lot more fun,” she says. Then, recalling the beloved family sheepdog who died saving young April Patterson, she chimes: “And Farley is coming back!”

HANK STUEVER; The Washington Post

The end of the world is here: Lizardbreath has married Blandthony. Grandpa Jim is on his deathbed, with pitiable second wife Iris at his side. Our protagonist, Elly Patterson, is a Kleenex-clutching mess, as ever. She can’t believe how the years have gone by a wrinkle at a time, blah blah blah.

Somebody says something disgustingly pithy every panel now. You can feel the comic-strip family saga known as “For Better or for Worse” (known to some as “FBOFW,” and to others simply as “Foob”) coming to a close, in a cataract haze of soft focus.

Foobsters everywhere, weep. Creator Lynn Johnston is semi-retiring, repurposing her archives beginning with this week’s strips. A comic strip that unfolded in real time – year by year, in which characters aged and changed and sometimes even died – will now only look backward, with enhanced reruns. As a farewell, Johnston seems to have made an extra effort to drench this week’s wedding of characters Elizabeth Patterson and Anthony Caine (if you read it, this is bigger than Luke and Laura) in even more sentimental goo than faithful readers have come to expect.

And so, on that note, let us now honor one kind of “For Better or for Worse” devotee: the haters.

These are the many millions who live to despise every last thing about the comic strip, and, as such, have never missed a day. For them, Foob has never been worse – worse puns, worse sap, even worse life choices. (Which, in a sick way, means “For Better or for Worse” has never been better!)

Elly became intolerably sentimental as a retiree, after she sold the bookstore. Her husband, John, the dentist, retreated into a symbolically sexless world of model railroads. Their son Michael hit it big with a best-selling novel (About what? We never learned) and he and his wife, Deanna, bought the old Patterson family home, somewhere in the suburbs of Toronto. Little sister April Patterson’s band, the Archies-esque 4-Evah, broke up, then got a new singer, making them 4Evah & Eva. Elizabeth (aka Lizardbreath) gave up her new life teaching native people in the Canadian hinterlands to move home and marry Anthony, her boring high school boyfriend.

If all of this means nothing to you, then carry on with your life.

For everyone else, let’s take one more opportunity to cringe.

For a long time you could live under the delusion that only you and your mom were reading it (and groaning at it). Once in a while you’d let it slip into conversation and discover that the whole world was reading “FBOFW,” too, and had been for decades. Brilliant economists, security guards, cool Web designers, punk rockers – all read it, and not only read it, but can remember when Farley the dog died after rescuing April from drowning, and when Lawrence came out of the closet. They can tell you why Paul was wrong for Elizabeth, but Warren wasn’t, or vice versa.

Readers can take their Foob fascination and ire as deep as they want. Online, there are pages and pages of disturbingly funny psychoanalysis. The Comics Curmudgeon routinely eviscerates it, hammering Johnston for its overly simplistic worldview. Yet you can sense the love, even in the Curmudgeon’s observations of the ghostly reappearance of Grandma Marion. She appeared as the wedding preparations came to a froth, invisibly “helping” Lizardbreath at a fitting of the same dress she wore to her own wedding:

“Grandma Marion is learning the sad truth about the comics afterlife,” the Comics Curmudgeon observed. “Despite the fact that you no doubt remember yourself as the ravishing young bride who actually wore the dress that you’re ectoplasmically helping to mend, you instead only get to come back as aged and potato-nosed. You’re also wearing an apron, because even in the Great Beyond, you’re expected to cook.”

True Foobsters loved to underscore their peeves: The way the characters ate (“smork, chomp, chew, smack”) or laughed with their mouths open and tongues out. Some loved to hate Elly’s obsession with housework, or Deanna’s blankly pretty face and lips. Little things can cause a Foobster to hurl the newspaper to the floor – especially the bad puns in the fourth panel, with those little bon mots about life. Lynn Johnston may think she has fans, but does she know she has such devoted anti-fans?

“I save up all my vitriol for this piece of … art,” says a woman named “Lia,” seen on a YouTube video posted last week, in which she ponders the end of a very long era: “I predict (Elizabeth) will become a binge drinker, get a raging case of herpes and will eventually have to leave Anthony.”

So here’s a question: Why did we spend the last three decades absorbed in the lives of the most boring people in Canada? Maybe it’s meant to be a puzzle, an emotional Sudoku. Truly understanding “FBOFW” requires more subtextual skill than, say, loathing “Cathy” or “The Family Circus” – where nothing ever changes, where nobody ever ages. “FBOFW” kept evolving, as did its magnificent ability to irritate.

On whom can we now direct our darkest wishes for tragedy? (Jeremy from “Zits”?) Who is worthy of both our love and our scorn?

Farewell, sweet Lizardbreath.