In Sept. 9, 1979, an unconventional comic strip debuted in about 250 American and Canadian newspapers.
In the strip, a mother wearing curlers and a bathrobe vacuums her home while her young son plays with an electrical plug nearby. The radio is playing a Burt Bacharach song about married couples.
As the lyrics unfold, the expression on her face grows angry.
Hey! little girl / comb your hair / fix your makeup. / Soon he will open the door.
Don’t think because / there’s a ring on your finger, / you needn’t try anymore.
For wives must always be lovers too / Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you.
Suddenly the mother picks up the vacuum cleaner and smashes the radio with it. Then she continues vacuuming.
On that Sunday 25 years ago, a new voice entered the comics pages and began a remarkable odyssey that would take the strip, “For Better or For Worse,” and its Canadian creator, Lynn Johnston, into the top ranks of modern-day comics.
And as Johnston celebrates the anniversary with a retrospective book, “Suddenly Silver” (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 304 pages, $16.95), she looks ahead to a more significant milestone: the end of the strip in its current form and the beginning of new ways to tell the saga of the Pattersons, the family at the strip’s center.
“I want to write the story and have it become a complete story so it’s got a beginning, middle and end,” Johnston said on a recent visit to Chicago, the last stop on her U.S. book tour. Her plan is to wrap up all the plot lines by September 2007, when her contract with Universal Press Syndicate ends.
She knows her fans will be disappointed when the daily strip ends. “I don’t want to give this saga up either,” she said. “But I’m also not going to be able to work constantly with the deadlines anymore … because of my health and my age. And there are other things I want to do and explore.”
Johnston, 57, and her syndicate are brain-storming about how to continue the story when the daily strip ends. Among the ideas is a series of animated TV specials. Johnston already has an animated series based on the strip that appears weekly on Canadian television. (The show is not available in the U.S.)
It’s also likely that the strip will continue to have a strong presence on the Internet. The current Web site, www.FBorFW.com, is elaborate, offering details about each character, news updates and a selection of strip-related merchandise for sale, among other things.
In addition, Johnston has more than 30 strip-related books in print, published by Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, which is owned by the same company that owns Universal Press Syndicate.
When Johnston talks about her health as a factor in her decision to end the daily strip, she is mostly referring to a neurological disorder she developed in the late 1990s called dystonia. The illness is characterized by involuntary, often painful muscle movements.
Johnston has a form of the disorder called cervical dystonia, or spasmodic torticollis, which affects the neck muscles. In her case her head twists violently to the left while she is lying down. The painful condition led to fatigue and depression, she said.
The inherited disorder affects at least 300,000 people in North America, according to the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation. At first Johnston could not find a treatment that was effective for her.
But she heard from a fellow sufferer that hormonal therapy can aggravate the condition. Johnston discontinued the therapy, and her symptoms improved significantly, though they did not disappear.
The condition forced some serious thinking about her career. “It really cut my hours back because I was tired all the time,” she said. “Also I’m older. I can’t see as well. I can’t draw for as long. You have to succumb and look in the mirror and say, `Well, it’s going to happen to me too.'”
In recent years Johnston has assembled a team to help with the strip and its burgeoning side businesses. That six-woman team handles duties such as finances, the licensing and sale of merchandise, the Web site and art direction. Her creative director, Laura Piche, helps produce the strip, inking in many of the characters and the backgrounds after Johnston has drawn them in pencil and inked the principal characters.
Husband sold dentistry practice
Rod Johnston, Lynn’s husband, sold his dentistry practice in 2001 and keeps busy with several projects, including a hobby train business and community efforts to improve the lakefront area in the city of North Bay, Ontario. The couple live in nearby Corbeil, about four hours’ drive north of Toronto.
Johnston and her team work in a building near the Johnstons’ home that has been transformed into a studio.
Whatever form “For Better or For Worse” takes, its audience is likely to be large and varied. The strip appears in more than 2,000 newspapers in 20 countries, including the Chicago Tribune. It appeals to a wide age spectrum.
The audience at her Nov. 9 book signing at Barnes and Noble in Skokie’s Old Orchard shopping center included preteens, teens, middle-age adults and senior citizens.
The comics pages have no shortage of family strips, but “For Better or For Worse” distinguished itself from the start. While focusing on daily life among Elly and John Patterson and their children Michael, Elizabeth and April, its humor often had a dark edge to it. The stressed-out wife and mother, the uncontrollable children wreaking havoc at home, the husband who doesn’t understand — these portraits appeared along with more warm, and conventional, scenes.
As time passed the strip evolved from its somewhat crude early form into a more sophisticated story with multiple characters and plot lines. On the way it broke new ground.
For one thing, the characters age in real time. Though the approach is not unprecedented — older strips such as “Gasoline Alley” use the same technique — it is unusual.
More important, however, was Johnston’s willingness to take on difficult or controversial topics, including infidelity, homosexuality and death.
Though some of the more controversial story lines angered many readers, the strip continued to grow in popularity.
This success can be attributed to Johnston’s uncanny ability to see into the heart of daily life so accurately that readers feel she is speaking directly to them.
Johnston’s husband described early audience reactions to the strip. “The thing that was a stunner to us — it really was a stunner in the early years — was that people wrote back saying `Exactly that happened to me. Where are you hiding in my house? Are you under the fridge?'”
Makes fun of characters
Asked what it is about Johnston that gives her this ability, those who know her use words such as humanity, generosity and vulnerability. And they all mention her sense of humor. Johnston’s penchant for making fun of her characters, loosely based on her own family, also endears her to readers.
In spite of such praise — or maybe because of it — Johnston often has discussed the less positive sides of her life. Newspaper reports over the years quote her describing herself as a difficult child, and her mother as a stern parent not above using corporal punishment.
And in “Suddenly Silver,” she writes of developing a swelled head as her strip caught on and the media came courting. “There was … a long talk with Rod, who asked me what I really wanted, and was I aware of how much I was changing, and not for the better,” she writes.
On the subject of how she is able to create story lines that ring true, she is straightforward.
“Everything that I do in the strip is something that, if I haven’t personally experienced it, I know somebody who has, and I work with them,” she said.
In other words, Johnston uses not just her own experiences, but the lives of those around her — family members, friends, colleagues — as fodder for the strip.
Among Johnston’s controversial plot lines, one of the best known is the one referred to by comics aficionados as “the Lawrence story.”
In the story line, published in 1993, Lawrence Poirier, a close friend and neighbor of the Pattersons’ son, Michael, reveals that he is gay. As the plot unspools, Lawrence suffers through the hurtful reactions of his closest friend and family members but eventually is rewarded with their acceptance, albeit reluctant.
The circumstances that led Johnston to write this story line were considerably more harsh than what appeared in the strip. They concerned a friend she had known since junior high school, Michael Boncoeur, who became a comedic actor and did some work for Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
“Michael was very flamboyant,” Johnston said. “He was a very charming, elegant, wonderfully funny guy.”
Remembering Michael
One day Boncoeur, who lived alone, met a homeless youth begging on the street. He gave the boy $40 toward food and shelter for the night, and told him that if he couldn’t find shelter, the boy could stay with Boncoeur for one night.
“Well, the kid took the 40 bucks, bought a knife, came back to Michael’s apartment, slit his throat, and took his bike and his CD player or whatever,” Johnston said, her voice rising in anger.
Though the youth was caught and convicted of first-degree murder, Johnston detected in media coverage of the case a sense that her friend was being portrayed as a homosexual predator who had lured the boy to his apartment.
“I was so motivated to do something that I did the [Lawrence] story for Michael,” she said. “But I couldn’t do it without the help of someone else, because I wanted to write with a voice that had a ring of truth to it.”
Johnston turned to her husband’s brother, Ralph Johnston, a musician and textile weaver who earlier had revealed to Lynn (first among his family members) that he was gay.
“When she came up with rough sketches for the first time, she asked me to take a look and see if I thought there was anything that didn’t sit right or might be offensive,” Ralph Johnson said in a phone interview. “It was pretty solid right from the beginning, mainly because she had thought about it enough and was sensitive enough to the issues anyway.”
As early word of the story line leaked out — comic strips are shipped to newspapers weeks in advance of publication — a groundswell of negative reaction began. Many of the letters were furious or threatening.
But after the series was published, the tide began to turn. Many people wrote to say the story had given them the courage to be honest with their family members.
Ultimately Johnston felt the story had accomplished what she wanted. “It just opened up a huge opportunity to talk,” she said. “So many young people said they were able to talk to their parents for the first time.”
Another thing that makes Johnston stand out is that there are few women creators among the most widely distributed strips.
Cathy’s a fan
One of those is Cathy Guisewite, whose strip “Cathy” debuted three years before “For Better or For Worse.” Guisewite’s strip, also with Universal Press Syndicate, is distributed to about 1,200 newspapers, mostly in the U.S.
“It was very refreshing for me to read another woman’s work — another woman who was writing about the real anxieties and real stresses of a very realistic woman and her family at that time,” said Guisewite, who gave Johnston advice when Johnston was developing her strip. “It was brand new to read something like that. I loved her work.”
Although men still outnumber women among comics creators, that is changing, said Rod Gilchrist, executive director of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He said he is seeing a large group of talented women among cartoonists age 25 and younger.
“I think we’re going to see a shift in that,” he said. “It’ll just be a natural evolution.”
Guisewite’s early support of Johnston is indicative of the collegial atmosphere in the world of newspaper comics. Johnston also received advice from Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” who became a friend. Now that Johnston is in the senior ranks, she, too, is advising aspiring cartoonists.
In her introduction to “Suddenly Silver,” Johnston writes that she is part of every character. So it’s not surprising to see her work philosophy voiced by one of the male characters, Gordon Mayes, a friend of Michael Patterson’s.
As Mayes begins to take over the business he will eventually buy, he tells John Patterson: “An’ you know what, Dr. P? I’m the toughest boss I’ve ever had!”
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THE BIO
Johnston: `Words are sounds, are music, are rhythm’
Lynn Johnston was born Lynn Ridgway in Collingwood, Ontario, and grew up in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Her father was a jeweler and her mother a calligrapher and bookkeeper.
Music was important in the Ridgway household. Johnston’s father played a number of instruments. “He played the guitar, the piano — anything with strings, really,” Johnston said while in Chicago recently. “If my mother would allow it in the house, we had it.”
Johnston herself learned to play the mouth organ and the accordion before studying guitar. Her younger brother became a professional trumpeter.
Johnston considered a career in music before opting for art.
“I really am such a perfectionist, and I wanted to be the best in the world at what I was doing, [so] that when the comic art thing came along, I had to drop the music because I couldn’t do both,” she said.
But music remains important to Johnston, and she believes a strong connection exists between music and writing.
“To me, words are sounds, are music, are rhythm,” she said. “And whenever I’m helping another cartoonist with his writing, I will often write it with him to show him how he can make it more comfortable for the audience by making it more rhythmic and more fun.”
The value of humor
Humor also was important in the Ridgway family. “We were a family that loved to laugh,” Johnston writes on her Web site, www.FBorFW.com.
Johnston went to the Vancouver School of Art with the goal of working in animation. After three years of school she went to work in a Vancouver animation studio in the ink and paint department.
Johnston married a television cameraman and moved to Ontario, where she worked as a medical illustrator at McMaster University in Hamilton for five years. When she became pregnant she decided to work as a freelance artist from home.
During her pregnancy she created more than 80 comic drawings for the ceilings of her obstetrician’s office, at his request. A collection of these were published in a book, “David, We’re Pregnant.”
Johnston had a son, Aaron, and her first marriage ended in divorce. She continued to work from home as a freelance artist, drawing and designing commercial products such as cereal boxes and billboards. Eventually she published two more books of humorous drawings on parenting.
In 1975 she married Rod Johnston, then a dental student in Toronto. They had a daughter named Kate, now 27. Son Aaron is 32.
At about the time the Johnstons were preparing to move to Lynn Lake, Manitoba, the small mining town where Rod Johnston had grown up, Universal Press Syndicate came calling. The syndicate wanted to know if Johnston was interested in doing a daily strip. She sent sample strips based on her family because she felt they were the only people she could draw with any consistency, and ended up signing a 20-year contract with the syndicate.
The flying dentist
Rod Johnston worked as a dentist serving the tiny population of Lynn Lake and outlying native villages. He flew himself to the villages by small plane.
The strip’s matron, Elly Patterson, was named for a friend of Johnston’s who had died. The husband and father, John Patterson, and their children Michael and Elizabeth were named using the middle names of Johnston’s husband and children. Johnston deliberately put three years’ distance between the ages of her real family members and those of the imaginary characters.
The Pattersons’ youngest, April, is the only character in the family who does not have a living counterpart in the Johnston family.
The Johnstons had considered having another child, but decided against it because son Aaron’s active nature “took all the energy we had,” Johnston wrote in her 20-year anniversary book, “The Lives Behind the Lines” (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 224 pages, $19.95).
Johnston was discussing the topic with fellow comic creator Cathy Guisewite when Guisewite said, “Why don’t you just make one up? Put a new baby in your strip,” Johnston wrote. So after much planning, baby April arrived on April 1, 1991 (March 31 in the Sunday color comics).
Johnston’s work has brought her numerous awards, among them the National Cartoonists Society’s 1985 Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year and the society’s 1991 awards for Best Story Strip Cartoonist and Best Newspaper Comic Strip.
— Pam Becker
