Lynn Johnston has chronicled the mythical Patterson family in the comic strip
"For Better or For Worse" since 1979. The strip, carried in newspapers from North America to Australia, holds up a magnifying glass to family life with insight, warmth, and sharp humor. Her own family, while not the family in the strip, provides much of her inspiration. How Lynn began writing and drawing "For Better or For Worse" for Universal Press Syndicate, how her creative process works, and her views on the industry in which she works were subjects she discussed with CompuServeCD. Additional insight on Lynn's life, her extraordinary childhood in an abusive family, and her work are detailed in a compelling interview with Tom Heintjes in the Comics and Animation Forum (JOHNST.TXT).
On Becoming a Cartoonist
Lynn was trained as a commercial artist at the Vancouver School of Art. "I wanted to be an illustrator, ... a commercial artist, ... [I] was able to get a job at a place called Canawest Films in Vancouver on Garard Street and they were doing animated work for Warner. I ... found myself in with a whole group of people who were very much like myself and I began apprenticing to do animated work and I expected to be an animator. I didn't expect to do the type of work I do now."
After moving to Ontario with her first husband, Lynn was unable to find animation work. Instead, she was hired by McMaster University as a medical illustrator. That led to her eventual work drawing comics for an obstetrician, and producing the book DAVID, WE'RE PREGNANT. "I found a publisher and it did very well and that really was my beginning, that was my start. I did two other small books, and all three books were sent to Universal Press Syndicate by one of the publishers. They offered me an opportunity to try my hand at a comic strip. I had never done anything like that before. I had done single panel art, but didn't know how to write dialog and I wasn't really sure I could draw the same characters over and over again so I chose my own family, planning to change that when I got a contract." When the contract arrived, Lynn kept the idea of a family, but changed the names and gave them all a three year age difference. Her real life children, Aaron and Katie, were provided with a buffer between them and the Patterson children's exploits.
On For Better or For Worse
Fans of the strip have followed the family as they have grown, gone to work, added a child and dealt with aging parents--in short, as they have faced many of the same issues families everywhere face. These issues remain fresh because the family ages in real time, but that wasn't the intention when the strip began. Lynn explains "When I first started the strip I expected the characters would stay the same age the
way they do in "Hi and Lois" and "Blondie," and some of the other family strips. But as in any type of creative writing the characters start to tell the story themselves, they start to take over on you and often in spite of you. There are times when you
want a storyline or a character to go in other directions, but that's not what happens...and so for these characters, ..they grew and at first it was slowly, and now it is chronological. "
Every year the characters age another year. This has presented Lynn with an obstacle in her on-going creation: learning to adjust the characters and their communication with one another. "It's going to be very difficult," she said, "that's probably another reason why it takes me much longer to do the strip now than ever before."
If you compare Lynn's strips from the late 1970s to the strips from the 1990s, you'll notice that more than the family has changed. "My work is much more sophisticated, much more stylized now...The writing is the hardest part and the drawing is for me the easiest." Lynn has found that adding more to the drawings enhances the story-telling ability of the strip. "If you draw sparse backgrounds and if you draw very limited drawings of the characters themselves it\rquote s very difficult for people to identify with them and see the vision you see."
On Her Creative Process
Few can imagine how a strip can be written so consistently and imaginatively. For Lynn, the strip evolves in an abstract, yet predictable way. "When I work, I like to get myself into a sort of dream state, I suppose. I sit and I close my eyes and I imagine myself to either be one of the characters or a fly on the wall just listening, hovering, hearing them. Almost as if I had a secret camera in somebody else's house. I try different dialog and see how it works and I try to write the dialog the way one would write a small story or script but I have to consider I have four panels a day and I have to have a punchline every single day. I have to make it worth reading so that's an art in itself. Its almost like writing short poetry, in that I have to have a statement, statement, statement, punchline every single day. Thats something I demand of myself, so I write everything first, I don't do little thumbnail sketches...."
"I like to write everything, and then I sit down and I draw in pencil and for me that putting my fantasy down--almost like a ghost appears on the paper which is my fantasy, my vision, and then when I finally do the inking, it's like touching that fantasy and bringing it to life..."
On the Business of Cartooning
"I think that the newspaper comics industry is changing so rapidly, it's hard to know where we are going, I know that computers are going to be the answer to print media communication, and news communication in the future, and I think what the online systems will offer us is the opportunity for people to see the work as it goes to the syndicate. For example... we send off packages of two to four weeks at a time plus the Sunday comics and you would be able to order these as a unit and especially work like mine... which runs small story lines, you would be able to read the full story line at one time without going through a day at time. You would also be able to see the artwork, I believe, in a larger format. You could blow up the panels one panel at a time, and you could look at the artwork that goes into those panels. As it is now in the newspaper, everything is so reduced, it's a crime because you really can't see the artistry, and therefore you can't become part of the
illustration, you can't walk into that illustration and really feel it the way you should be able to... a larger format will help you connect with the characters ..."
"Probably for me the most satisfying part of this business... is the contact I have with
other cartoonists, many of whom have been heroes of mine since I was very young. When I was five I was reading "Peanuts"... and "Hi and Lois" and "Blondie"...they are classics now. For me to know these people personally, to be able to call them, to feel welcome and accepted and appreciated is a rare thing. I think that this industry is rare in that we are a supportive, affectionate, genuinely appreciative bunch. We do enjoy each other's work, we do commiserate, we do help each other and even though there is a tremendous competition for the space on the page, the competition is generally left up to the syndicates and their sales staff. If "Blondie" takes "For Better or For Worse" out of a page like a game of checkers, then I don't really know about it, I'm still free to be a very good friend of Dean Young and his wonderful family...It's a rare talent that can produce this amount of work for so many years."
