For Better or for Worse creator slowing down, not retiring
First, the bad news: Lynn Johnston needs a break.
The cartoonist has, after all, written and drawn the popular comic strip For Better or for Worse for 28 years, in sickness and in health, without complaint, while Aaron McGruder (Boondocks), Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and others griped, took extended hiatuses and retired.
"What wusses!" she exclaims.
But Johnston turns 60 this year, and she wants to do things in life that are difficult to do while producing 365 comic strips a year.
"I want to travel and study and paint, and I want to spend some time with friends and family," Johnston says.
"We're starting to get to the stage when you go to funerals and that's where you reunite with friends," she continues. "I want to be able to spend time with friends while they're still alive."
The good news, however, is that Johnston isn't retiring. Instead, the strip — which appears in more than 2,000 newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle — will be transformed in September into what Johnston calls "a hybrid" of new and old material.
She will continue to write and draw, but the new material will serve to frame flashbacks consisting primarily of recycled material. These strolls down memory lane also sometimes will contain new material that amplifies, embellishes or completes story lines of old.
For instance, Johnston mentions a character, Deena, who was absent from the strip for a long time without explanation. In her head she knew why Deena disappeared, but she never got around to drawing it. Now she will.
For the most part, however, the continuing saga of the Patterson family will end. Characters will stop aging. Existing story lines will be wrapped up before the change. Think of the new format as a long goodbye.
This creative solution to the problem of cartoonist burnout will lessen Johnston's workload while still making the strip available to readers daily.
"I wanted to retire completely," says Johnston, who has never taken a break from the strip. Her thinking always was, "If Charles Schulz can do it, so can I," she said, referring to the creator of Peanuts, who drew his strip for just short of 50 years, giving it up only weeks before he died Feb. 12, 2000.
"I don't know whether it's my age or that I was raised on hard work," Johnston says, but while other cartoonists complained about oppressive deadlines her feeling was, "You've got a job — do it."
But now she says she'd love to be able, for the first time in almost three decades, to take a two-week vacation without first laboring nights and weekends to finish two weeks' worth of strips in advance.
Contributing to her decision is a neurological disorder — dystonia — that, though mostly in check, causes tremors.
It comes in handy when door-to-door salesmen visit. "I come to the door already shaking my head no," Johnston says with a laugh.
It's not nearly as bad as the tremors Schulz had in his later years that caused him to draw wiggly lines.
"I watched Sparky draw," Johnston says, using Schulz's nickname. "He had to hold his right hand with his left hand to keep it still."
Johnston's condition doesn't affect her drawing. She does, however, use assistants to do the lettering and to ink most of the drawings. Johnston draws everything in pencil and inks the characters but not the backgrounds.
When Johnston told Universal Press Syndicate, the company that distributes the strip to newspapers, that she planned to retire, executives suggested offering reprints to newspapers, similar to what United Feature Syndicate did with Peanuts after Schulz stopped drawing.
"That had never occurred to me," Johnston says. She came up with the idea of updating the material and framing the flashbacks with new work "to keep my hand in," she says.
Before the late 1980s, syndicates routinely hired new cartoonists to continue comic strips after their creators died or retired, but now top-selling creators get to retain ownership of their works. For Better or for Worse can pass to another cartoonist only if Johnston says so.
She tried it. She talked to another cartoonist about taking the reins. The other cartoonist, whom she did not name, demurred, saying that For Better or for Worse was Johnston's baby.
It really is. The Pattersons are based on Johnston's own family. She made the children — only two, Michael and Elizabeth, in the early years — three years younger than her own in hopes of sparing her kids from ridicule, though they still got ragged by their friends.
For Better or for Worse has blazed trails from the beginning. Not only was it the first family-centered strip created by a woman, but its characters also inhabited something like the real world instead of the usual timeless cartoon universe where nobody dies or moves away.
Michael and Elizabeth are adults now, and April, who was born (at home during an ice storm) in 1991, is a teenager.
The characters will stop aging in September because extending two story lines simultaneously would be too complicated. "Then you'd have a comic strip within a strip," Johnston says.
The flashbacks might be triggered by family members looking at photo albums or reminiscing about an incident, she says.
"We really don't know what it's going to look like until we start to do it," Johnston says. To her knowledge, no other cartoonist has done anything like this.
She started the strip 28 years ago with the same exploratory spirit.
Universal approached her about doing the strip after seeing three books of single-panel cartoons she'd done about childbirth. Back then, other comic strips about family life, such as Blondie and Hi and Lois, were done by men. In fact, Cathy, by Cathy Guisewite, was one of the few strips done by a woman. Seeing its success, Universal wanted to see a woman's take on home life.
Not sure how to go about it, Johnston relied on Guisewite for help.
Guisewite told her that she wrote her stories out "like little plays." Johnston took her advice and still follows it.
Initially, she'd intended to do a gag-a-day strip like most of the others on the comics pages. But whenever she'd write a gag, Johnston says, "I just kept saying to myself, 'But then what happened?' " Nor did she intend at first for the characters to age or for Farley, the family's first pet, to die or for Michael to have a friend who was gay. It just worked out that way.
Over the years, Johnston says she's been approached by television and movie producers, and an animated series was briefly based on the strip. But producers tend to want to relocate the family to the American Midwest or make other changes. Johnston, who lives in Toronto, likes what she calls the "uniquely Canadian" feel of the strip and doesn't want the characters changed in major ways.
There also was another problem: Because the characters age and evolve, by the time a movie could be written, shot and released, the script already would be outdated.
She acknowledges, though, that the coming format change, with its flashbacks, would work well on the screen.
She will use the time between now and September to finish existing story lines and provide an ending. "It will be a full family circle, one full generation," she says, noting that Michael, who was a child when the strip started, now has two children, just as his parents did in 1989 when For Better or for Worse began.
