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Michael and his young family are settling into their new home, Elizabeth has found new love with an old flame, and April is strumming her guitar and dreaming of veterinary school. Their parents, dentist John and homemaker Elly, are doting on the grandkids.

And that's where the lives of the Patterson family - the focus of the comic strip and Canadian success story For Better or For Worse - will remain.

After 28 years of chronicling the family's ups and downs, Ontario-based cartoonist Lynn Johnston is easing into semi-retirement by removing the comic's most challenging element: The Pattersons will no longer age in real time.

Now, only a week after the new "hybrid" version appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers in 23 countries, devoted readers are having trouble leaving their favourite cartoon family behind.

In a strange way, some readers say, they "grew up" with the Pattersons. As the characters faced life's trials - first steps, school, university, failed relationships, the death of the family pet - readers did, too.

So how can they read on, knowing they'll never find out how the Pattersons' lives end?

"I know how silly it is, but they're real to me," says Barbara Wolfe, 60, who has been reading the comic in The Philadelphia Inquirer since Elizabeth, now 26, was born.

"It's like watching a friend move away and go somewhere where they're pretty much incommunicado."

Tara Lindgren, a single 30-year-old web developer from Winnipeg, begins her work day with a coffee and For Better or For Worse "because of Elizabeth's story, mostly. That's the one I relate to."

While Ms. Lindgren appreciated Elizabeth's courage in leaving home for university and work, it's her soap-opera love life that has kept the devout fan of sappy chick flicks and Jane Austen hooked.

Elizabeth's last boyfriend, Warren the pilot, "was kind of like the guy you always wished you'd met," she says.

Jim Inman, a 31-year-old marketing director from Bloomington, Ind., began reading For Better or For Worse at age 13. He faced the same girl troubles and high-school angst as Michael did.

Later, as Michael entered the job market, risked a switch in careers and bought his first home - so did Mr. Inman. "That was stuff that was going on in my life," he said.

Ms. Johnston announced her plans for the comic's new "hybrid" form in January, unleashing a flurry of protests in the blogosphere and fan sites.

In the new format, old material will be recycled in the form of characters' memories, Michael's young family will become the main focus as Elly and John fade into the background, and current storylines - such as Elizabeth's tangled love life - should wrap up this year.

In their web posts, many readers warned it was a mistake to focus on "boring" Michael, an aspiring writer in his early 30s.

Some tried to focus on the positive: At least Ms. Johnston wasn't retiring altogether. Others begged her to reconsider.

"Stopping the aging is terrible," wrote one distraught reader. "It would amount to the evisceration of the strip."

Readers feel so strongly about comic strip characters because reading comics - unlike watching cartoons - requires so much "involve-

ment," says Tom Spurgeon, editor of The Comics Reporter, an online magazine based in New Mexico. "It's an art that we kind of all engage in our pyjamas," Mr. Spurgeon said.

"It's a very private moment. You kind of have to connect the dots to get from picture to picture."

That involvement becomes even more intense with comics like For Better or For Worse, because readers see their own lives mirrored in the characters' lives, says Rod Gilchrist, executive director of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

"[Lynn Johnston] hits on certain universal themes around parenthood and childhood, and even the process of aging that we all have in common," he said. "It has this power to connect, and not a lot of strips really do that."

Lynn Johnston, now 60, says she knows the secret to her work's popularity.

"It's believable," she said in an interview from her studio in Corbeil, Ont., about 350 kilometres north of Toronto. "I got letters from people who said, 'Gee, that happened to me.' "

She considered several options when deciding how to reduce her work load and make more time for new adventures: travel, painting and learning Spanish.

She could quit cold turkey like Gary Larson did with The Far Side, and Bill Watterson did with Calvin and Hobbes. She could syndicate the comic strip the way Jim Davis did with Garfield, allowing other artists to ghostwrite the strip. Other popular comics, such as Peanuts, have died with their creators.

But Ms. Johnston wanted to continue. Her best option, she decided, was to get rid of one of the comic's most challenging elements: aging in real time. Changing a character's appearance, friends and homes as they transition through life requires an immense amount of planning, she says.

"Every time Elizabeth moves I have to give her a new floor plan, new furniture, colour scheme and everything."

More importantly, Ms. Johnston says she's had trouble keeping in touch with the times. When she first began writing about the Pattersons in 1979, Ms. Johnston found inspiration from her own life as a married mother of two young children.

Now her children are adults and, so far, Ms. Johnston has no grandchildren. She and her husband, Ron, separated in April after more than 30 years of marriage. She says it's tough to stay in touch with parenting issues of today, such as cyber-bullying or whether to buy your eight-year-old a cellphone.

"If you're not going to be current, you're not going to be believed," Ms. Patterson says. "So, best to admit that."