CSotD: Saturday profile: Lynn Johnston of “For Better or For Worse”
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(Editor's note: The Saturday profiles are pieces I wrote in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY. Since that time, FBOFW has ended its first run and gone back to the beginning, retelling the story with a combination of old and new strips. This is a direction Johnston decided on after this interview, and so I've sampled strips from the era of the interview above, and from the new run below.)
What makes cartoonists laugh?
The late '90s TV show "Caroline in the City," in which Lea Thompson portrayed a cartoonist provided guffaws throughout the industry, according to "For Better or Worse" creator Lynn Johnston.
"She never worked! Her assistant did all the work while she went out on dates!" laughs Johnston, whose strip runs in 2,000 newspapers in 22 countries and eight languages.
The real life of a syndicated cartoonist is more demanding than that,' she says. "This is something you can't take a vacation from, and you can't get help with it, or, at least, if you do, it has to be someone
you're extremely, extremely compatible with," Johnston explains.
The deadlines are unrelenting, but that's not what makes the profession so demanding, she says.
"You have to work hard because you're competing against yourself," she said.
Two decades ago, as a budding cartoonist, Johnston received advice and coaching from "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz, who emphasized the need for every day's work to be your absolute best.
"Some days you're really clever and some days you're just not, but your work has to be the best job you can possibly do that day," she learned.
"You're connecting with readers, and they're going to know if you slacked off."
The death of Schulz two years ago left Johnston as one of the senior resources for young cartoonists. Like Schulz, she takes time to offer advice, but much of it has little to do with specific art techniques and a great deal more to do with the creative process itself.
"A lot of young artists don't know how to do punch lines," she says. "They don't understand grammar and how to use words. You have to be literate, and I worry about people who don't read enough and study in school, and who don't enjoy poetry. If your wording isn't just right, if you have some grammatical error in the middle of the strip, it's like you've put these massive bumps in the road as the reader is going along."
In addition to word flow and timing, cartoonists have to be able to stage their scenes flawlessly, she insists. "Some young cartoonists are lazy; they don't want to learn how to draw a chainsaw or some other thing, or to show different perspectives. They don't pay attention to where the characters are looking, and characters have to make eye contact with each other. It's an acting job, and you have to deal with the same things a film director deals with."
Johnston's strip is unique among current cartoons in that she works a joke into each day's strip, but tells a continuing story in real time, with characters aging and changing. Michael was a small child when "For Better or For Worse" began, and Elizabeth a toddler. Today, Michael is married and a father, while Elizabeth is a college student doing her student teaching, and a new young Patterson, April, is on the verge of her teen years.
That has led to an increasingly complex universe that is beginning to get difficult to handle, Johnston admits. "When they were young, the entire viewpoint of the strip radiated from inside the house," she says. "But as children grow up, they start to have their own friends and their own things going on."
Johnston gets e-mail from a variety of people who want to be kept current on the strip's diverging threads. But each time she revisits one of them, the emerging storyline needs to be set up.
For example, April's first rabbit, Mr. Bun, has died and is in the freezer awaiting spring burial. But Johnston needs to develop the new bunny's place before she concludes the story of Mr. Bun. Meanwhile, down at Ellie's store, there is a young employee, Kortney, who isn't working out. Ellie is softhearted, but her fulltime employee, Moira, is running out of patience with Kortney.
And then there is Deanna, Michael's wife, a pharmacist who "accidentally" got pregnant just as Michael was about to launch an independent writing career. Deanna isn't very likeable, Johnston concedes.
"It's a reality," she says. "She grew up pampered, pampered, pampered; a favorite kid who got everything she wanted."
Without giving anything away, Johnston promises resolution.
"There will be a 'Clash of the Titans," she says.
These threads, and others, will have to be gathered on the spool within the next four and a half years. That's when Johnston is retiring the strip.
"I want to stop while it's still a popular strip, while people still enjoy it," she says. "I don't want people to get tired of it."
Besides, cartooning is hard work.
"I want to play now," Lynn Johnston says.
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