"My mother was a very literate person who had educated herself. She had an exceptional vocabulary." -- Lynn Johnston
Lynn Johnston, CM, OM (born May 28, 1947) is a Canadian cartoonist, well known for her comic strip For Better or For Worse, and was the first woman and first Canadian to win the National Cartoonist Society's Reuben Award.
"Aaron and I will be joined at the hip until the day we die. We have loved and hated each other since the day he was born. He's very much a part of my heart. He's going to broadcasting college now, and he'll do fine. But he came into a world that did not welcome him.""After I got this job at the syndicate, I started sending them money so they could go on trips and do the things they could never afford to do. All the while, I never knew that my mother was socking money away.""And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.""But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home.""But I married a guy who treated me very badly, but I was happy. I was miserable, so I was happy.""Complaining is good for you as long as you're not complaining to the person you're complaining about.""I know it sounds crazy, but I have had far more connection with my parents after their deaths.""I loved the Little Lulu stories, where she would fantasize that her bedroom rug would turn into a pool of water, and she could dive down into the center of the world.""I often think you bring unhappiness on yourself, because if you don't like yourself very much, you allow yourself to be influenced by people who reinforce that.""I was just so lucky to have a wonderful life after a tough marriage.""I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.""I've had some tremendous adventures, good and bad. It's part of the novel, and a novel isn't interesting if it doesn't have some good and bad. And you don't know what good is if bad hasn't been a part of your life.""If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper.""In a way, a certain amount of self-criticism is a good thing, because it keeps you humble. Realizing that no matter what success you've achieved, you can still make enemies makes you humble, too.""It's taken me a long time to become the person I am, for all the ugliness to fall away. The rotten flesh is gone, and the seed is there. I can touch that now.""Mom and Dad would stay in bed on Sunday morning, but the kids would have to go to church.""My brother was a great audience, and if he liked the picture, he would laugh and laugh and laugh, and he would want to keep the picture. Making people laugh with an image I had created... what power that was!""No matter how old you are, there's always something good to look forward to.""Only a couple of times have I ever been to church and felt enlightened by it.""People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions - board games, recipes... we never stopped inventing.""Sure, I've had some bad times, but everybody does. But people don't get to talk about them like I do, unless they do to a therapist. People don't get to put them in the paper like I do.""That's what my mother did. And my father was the first person she'd met who treated her kindly. She was terrified of men, and she married a very meek, kind, dear man. And she had the upper hand. She ruled the roost.""The most profound statements are often said in silence.""When Kate was born, she was born into a world of joy and happiness and confidence. The difference between the children is night and day. She's happy, she's thriving, she's full of self-confidence. I tell her she's beautiful every day before I send her off to school.""Yes, and when I had Aaron, he left me, and I didn't know how to raise a child. And I wasn't close to my parents, and because I was too proud to go to my parents for help, I mistreated that little baby. I didn't want a baby.""You see, anything I imagined, I could draw.""You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian."
Born Lynn Ridgway in Collingwood, Ontario, she was raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended the Vancouver School of Art with hopes of making a living as an artist. After working briefly in animation, she married in 1969, and moved back to Ontario, where she worked as a medical artist at McMaster University for five years. Johnston's illustrations are currently in storage in McMaster's medical archive. They include depictions of routine hospital happenings, such as a father smoking in the waiting room.
While expecting her first child, she drew single-panel cartoons for the ceiling of her obstetrician's office. Those drawings were published in her first book, entitled David We're Pregnant, which was published in 1973. After her divorce, she did free-lance commercial and medical art in a greenhouse which was converted into a studio. Hi Mom! Hi Dad!, a sequel to David, was published in 1975. Shortly thereafter, she met and married dental student Rod Johnston.
In 1978, the Johnstons and their two children relocated to Lynn Lake, Manitoba. She was asked by Universal Press Syndicate if she was interested in doing a comic strip. She sent off twenty copies of a strip called The Johnstons, based on her own family "since we were the only people I knew I could draw over and over again with some consistency." Much to her surprise, the syndicate approved of the initial strips and offered her a twenty-year contract. After a six-month "work-up" period, the strip first appeared in newspapers throughout Canada under the title For Better or For Worse. The strip is currently carried by about 2000 newspapers in Canada, the U.S. and 20 other countries.
Many story lines draw from her family's real-life experiences. Her main characters are named after the middle names of her husband and children. Elly is named after a friend who died when Johnston was young. Her brother-in-law Ralph Johnston inspired the controversial story about Lawrence's coming out. Deanna was based on Johnston's son's high school sweetheart, who died in a car accident years after her relationship with Johnston's son ended. Johnston's niece Stephanie is developmentally handicapped and her experience is shared in recent story lines on the integration of developmentally handicapped students in April's class.
The characters in For Better of For Worse have aged in "real time". On August 31, 2008, Johnston herself appeared in the Sunday strip, which was supposed to be the end of the cartoon, and announced that she would take the story back nearly 30 years to soon after its beginning, with half of the material to be new and the other half repeats.
Since the 1990s, Johnston has been notably forthcoming in her discussion of the abuse inflicted on her by her mother, her first husband, and being unprepared to be a mother to her son Aaron...topics which have also been reflected in the strip. A column by Jan Wong of the Globe & Mail, reprinted in Lunch With Jan Wong disclosed Johnston's difficult personality and considerable irascibility, and provided an alternate insight into her some of her complaints of being victimised by persons in her life.
Johnston now resides in the Northern Ontario town of Corbeil. Her daughter Katie lives in Corbeil and works at the For Better or For Worse studio, while her son Aaron works in the television industry in Vancouver, BC. In September 2007, Lynn and Rod Johnston announced their separation and intention to divorce. Johnston had talked about either ending For Better or For Worse or handing it off to another cartoonist, but changed her mind as a result of her split from her husband of over 30 years.
Johnston claimed a close friendship with Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts.
