The Lynn Johnston Interview

(Originally presented in Hogan's Alley #1, published in 1994.)

It's easy to form a mistaken impression about Lynn Johnston. I should know. Thinking myself rather well-informed, I had known her to be a fantastically talented woman masterminding one of the most successful strips-critically and popularly-in recent comics history. I also knew she loosely modeled For Better Or For Worse on her own family. And I was also aware that Universal Press Syndicate had sought her out, intent on convincing her to wield her unique talents in fashioning a new type of family strip-one done by a woman. (This was during a time when Cathy Guisewite's Cathy had shown the comics-reading public to be hungry for a female perspective.) To prepare for this interview, I read the autobiographical introduction to her strip's tenth-anniversary collection, where I learned about her childhood, which overall seemed healthy and normal. What I did not and could not know, however, was even more striking and served to heighten my already considerable admiration for the woman behind the drawing board. In achieving the pinnacle of success she currently enjoys as the creator of a strip appearing in more than 1,600 papers, Lynn Johnston had to rise above obstacles that would have shackled most people. If For Better Or For Worse seems so honestly and genuinely realized, its characters so in touch with themselves and their world, it is because they are extensions of their creator's complex and perceptive personality. Lynn, 46, was born Lynn Ridgway in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada, and she grew up in British Columbia. She is married to Rod Johnston (whose middle name is John). She has two children, Aaron Michael, 20, and Katy Elizabeth, 16. (Do those middle names sound familiar?) They live in Corbeil, Ontario. This interview was conducted, transcribed and edited by Tom Heintjes.

Tom Heintjes: As a child, you were something that a lot of cartoonists weren't--you were outgoing and extroverted, the class clown, the prankster.
Lynn Johnston: I was outgoing and extroverted in the wrong way. I was a fighter. I was angry. I wanted to fight, and I wanted to hurt people.
Tom Heintjes: What was the source of that anger?
Lynn Johnston: I was very unhappy at home. 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. She was brought up with a "spare the rod and spoil the child" philosophy, and she was raised by a father who brutalized her. He didn't want daughters. He wanted sons. He had no time for daughters. He refused to educate his daughters. It was a waste of his money. And they all left home as soon as they possibly could. Some of them ran away from home, some left to join the armed forces. 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.
My father was beaten as a child. His philosophy became, "I refuse to lay a hand on my children."
Tom Heintjes: That's the opposite approach of most abused children.
Lynn Johnston: Right. But my mother's philosophy was, the harder you beat them, the more they'll realize that what they've done is wrong. She would hit me until she was exhausted. She would use brushes, broomsticks, anything she could wield. I could look at the different bruises and tell what she had hit me with. If it was a black bruise with a red stripe down the middle, it was a piece of kindling. If it was a brown bruise with a certain shape to it, it was a hairbrush. If it was perfectly round, it was a wooden spoon. I used to go to school with bruises from the middle of my back to my heels.
Tom Heintjes: And your father never interceded?
Lynn Johnston: Never. And my mother was so full of anger and hate. She was a brilliant woman. She could have done anything. She was a writer, she was an artist, she was a calligrapher, just a brilliant, talented lady with potential beyond belief. Right after the war, she married a man and had a family. But she wanted a career. She wanted to be a doctor. God help you if you got sick, because her home remedies would kill you. Poultices, enemas, and God knows what else. But at that time it was not appropriate for a woman to go to work. Her work was in the home. Everybody saw these magazine ads with the lady in the dress who stayed at home all day.
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.
Tom Heintjes: Did your mother feel a need to always be in control of any given situation?
Lynn Johnston: Oh, yes. You talk about women in the military . . . she would have gone over the hill first. She would have held the machine gun until the last bullet was fired. She was a fighter.
Tom Heintjes: What were your parents like when there wasn’t strife?
Lynn Johnston: My mother was a very literate person who had educated herself. She had an exceptional vocabulary. 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. He was an exciting person to have in your home. When he got a few drinks in him, he was on. And he wasn’t an alcoholic. But he was a performer, and all he needed was a beer in his hand and he was gone. So the two of them together were very witty, very funny. And we never dealt with anything straight out in our home. If something happened, it was over and done. But there was an undercurrent of anger and hate and unresolved problems, all the time.
For example, my mother would look at you and you would ask, “What’s wrong?” and she would say, “Well, you should know.” And it might be about something you said two weeks ago. But she would never tell you why she was angry with you. She might be angry with my father or my brother or someone else, and then something like a spilled bowl of cereal or a bad word would make her strike out, and she would beat and beat and beat and beat and beat you. You could see this look on her face that was pure rage.
When I got too big for her to beat, she would scream things at me like, “You fat cow! You ugly duck!” She just didn’t know any better, because that was the sort of thing she grew up with. Back then, there were no parenting groups. There were no books. All she knew was, “I have to get this ugly thing into line. I have to force this thing to toe the line.”
I haven’t told many people this because my parents were still alive and I didn’t want to reveal it, but I want you to print this, because it happens in so many families! She really cared, though. It’s hard to describe. On the one hand, she beat the living crap out of me. On the other hand, though, she was bright and witty and well read. Neither of my parents ever stopped encouraging my brother and me from pursuing our creativity. They let us take all kinds of art classes. My dad made $47 a week at the jeweler’s shop in Vancouver. If there was any money left over, we would go to see a movie or something like that. My mother used to shop for clothes at the Salvation Army. She would buy trenchcoats there and remake them to fit us. She made us the most wonderful clothes. We never realized how poor we were! She was a survivor. We grew our own food, and we were never hungry. My mother saved every scrap of food either for the compost heap or for the birds. People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions—board games, recipes. . . we never stopped inventing.
Tom Heintjes: Both of your parents had come through the Great Depression.
Lynn Johnston: That’s right, and they had a Depression mindset. 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 when my mother passed away, I found she had a bank account with $60,000 in it!
Tom Heintjes: How long ago did she pass away?
Lynn Johnston: It’s been four years now.
Tom Heintjes: It sounds as if you’ve reconciled your feelings toward your parents.
Lynn Johnston: It’s taken a long time. You know, when she died, I didn’t cry. I stood by the bed she had just died in, and I remember being very clinical, thinking, “She is still warm,” folding her arms across her body, tilting her head. It was very strange. Then I came home from the hospital, and I was sitting on the side of her bed, looking into her closet. I looked at her clothes, and you know what I thought of?
Tom Heintjes: What was that?
Lynn Johnston: I thought of the Wicked Witch of the West, who turned into a puff of smoke after the house crushed her, and all that was left of her were her shoes. That’s what I thought. And it took me a long time before I could see past that and see her as something else—a strong, positive influence on me in many ways.
Tom Heintjes: I’m having a little bit of trouble reconciling what I’m hearing now with what you wrote of your childhood in the 10th anniversary For Better Or For Worse collection.
Lynn Johnston: That book was written before my parents passed away. I was very, very protective of my parents. We were never able to resolve all these issues. We never talked about it. I remember after my mother’s death, I thought my father would talk to me about it. It was a perfect time to talk about it. One beautiful sunny Saturday he and I were taking a walk along the river, and we were talking about our lives together and growing up. And I said to him, “Dad, I want to talk to you about Mom beating us.”And he said, “I will not talk about it.” So part of him was acknowledging that it happened, and part of him was saying that it never happened at all. So when something goes unresolved, you have to resolve it some way. One way to resolve it is with the death of the people, because there is a certain romanticism that comes with death. I know it sounds crazy, but I have had far more connection with my parents after their deaths.
I’m not a great driver. I often get extremely frustrated with great big trucks in front of me and people driving too slowly. And just the other day, I almost killed my daughter and myself because I didn’t wait for a sensible place to pass. I was thinking that somehow there’s a hand on me that’s keeping me safe. One time I was on an airplane in a terrible storm. The woman sitting next to me had white knuckles, staring anxiously out the window. And I wanted to say to her, “We’re not going to crash—you’re with me!” I lead a charmed life, I really do.
Tom Heintjes: Are you religious?
Lynn Johnston: I don’t like organized religion where people tell me I have to follow a certain dogma. I don’t like other people interpreting Scriptures for me. I like to interpret them for myself. Not that I feel that I’m the only one who can, but I just feel . . . let’s put it another way. Only a couple of times have I ever been to church and felt enlightened by it. When I was a kid, I was in the choir, and I remember the politics of the choir. The favorite kids got to sing solos, the kids who were not favorites didn’t. When I was 16, I was in the choir, and I was taking off my surplice after a performance, and this old gray-haired guy from the bass section grabbed my breast from behind. I spun around and said, “What are you doing?!” and he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I was helping you off with your surplice.” And the way he said it, I thought, how can I believe that he wasn’t trying to help me? But when I got out of church that day, I thought, “How could that happen in church, of all places?” So church for me was always politics and lies.
Tom Heintjes: Did your household have a pretense of being religious?
Lynn Johnston: It was “do as I say, not as I do.” Mom and Dad would stay in bed on Sunday morning, but the kids would have to go to church.
Tom Heintjes: Really?
Lynn Johnston: Oh, yeah. They went to church on holidays.
Tom Heintjes: Did you mind going to church under these circumstances?
Lynn Johnston: Well, I loved to sing, just loved it. I loved to sing harmonies. So the choir for me was wonderful. The dogma of the church was secondary. After I proved I could keep a tune, I loved getting to sing solos.
Tom Heintjes: Did you devise any sort of escape mechanism for the life you had?
Lynn Johnston: I was very reclusive. I spent hours and hours in my room drawing. That was my release, and that was my way of surviving. You see, anything I imagined, I could draw. And I found that if I was in a terrible depression and I closed my eyes, the blackness would appear to go on forever. But if I put it down on paper, it was no bigger than 8 1ž2 by 11, and I could deal with that. If you have a horror inside of you, it goes down to your marrow. But on paper, it’s not so bad.
Tom Heintjes: So drawing became a form of therapy.
Lynn Johnston: It was a way to survive. 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. [laughter] If I wanted to draw funny pictures, I would draw them, and I remember loving watching my brother laugh at them. 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!
Tom Heintjes: How did your upbringing affect the way you rear your own children? Do you find yourself reacting against the way she brought you up?
Lynn Johnston: [Pause] I treat my children both like my mother and myself. But I really need to answer that question later, because I had to go through so much before I learned how to raise my children.
I had a terrible marriage the first time around because I had no self-confidence, even though I had tremendous self-confidence. That was the strange thing. That’s why I’m a perfect Gemini. One part of me says that no matter what happens, I have a talent that no one else has. I could sing, I could write, I have so many gifts that I could fall back on. I knew I wouldn’t have to work at Woolco. I could go into show business. I knew, deep down inside, that I was never going to starve.
The other side of me said, “You’re fat, you’re ugly, you don’t deserve the best.” I never believed I was in love with a guy unless I was crying into my pillow. Any kind man who brought me flowers and remembered my birthday, I thought, “You wimp!” Any guy who treated me like shit, I wanted! “Please God, don’t let him go! He said he’d call me!” So I went for these guys who treated me like shit, and I married one of them! The guys who treated me badly were the funny guys, and I always went for the guys with the sense of humor. But I married a guy who treated me very badly, but I was happy. I was miserable, so I was happy.
Tom Heintjes: This was Doug, the man who gave you Aaron?
Lynn Johnston: 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. I wanted the stability that a family was supposed to represent. And a baby can’t say, “Thanks, Mom, for feeding me and keeping me warm and dry even though I screamed my lungs out all night last night.” And they want and they want and they want and they want. The only satisfaction you have is that they’re fed and they’re warm and they’re safe and they’re thriving, and they smile at you every once in a while. They’re not going to thank you until they’re 45. [laughter]
I remember once when he was very unhappy and he was screaming and screaming, and I threw him out into a snow bank in his pajamas. This was in Ontario, and it was not warm here. And he put his hands against the window of the front door, pleading to be let in. And I was inside, screaming at him, “If you don’t want to sleep all night, you can friggin’ sleep outside!” And this was a teeny baby. And I don’t know what it was—it was almost like at that moment, my guardian angel put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Open the door.”
The next morning, I called a very good friend of mine who was working at the hospital. I had also been doing some work for this hospital on a freelance basis. And I said to my friend, “I need some help. I don’t known how to parent.” Now, you say to yourself, “I’·m a mature adult—I should know how to parent.” But raising a child is not like training a dog. [laughter] I was not a sensible mother. I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know about time out. I didn’t know to say, “OK, we’re both out of control, let’s have time out for five minutes and calm down.”
I was in a very unhappy situation. I was lonely, I was single, and I had all the elements set against me. I had no support. And it didn’t help that I had a very irritable, difficult child. He’s going to go into the theater. [laughter] He’s a performer. He’s witty. He could go into stand-up comedy. He’s taken all his anger and turned it into something creative.
Tom Heintjes: Sounds like he got those traits honestly.
Lynn Johnston: He did. 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. I was exactly like my mother in that sense. I just didn’t know how to raise him. I had grown up with all the anger, the frustration, and I didn’t know how to raise a child.
Tom Heintjes: Did you ever physically discipline Aaron?
Lynn Johnston: I only hit him once. Hard. I felt myself becoming my mother—and I couldn’t bear that! I did shout a lot, and I cried a lot. I didn’t want to hit Aaron, because he was so small. I can remember my mother dragging my brother around by his arm, like a little monkey. That image was very clear in my memory, and I could never do something like that to my own child. That’s one thing that’s always served me well as an artist—I could draw that scene right now, because I can recall it so well. I don’t forget things like that.
Tom Heintjes: Has your husband helped you shape your approach to child rearing?
Lynn Johnston: Oh, yes. I was lucky enough to marry the dearest man in the whole world who, without a psychologist’s papers, is able to observe a situation and . . . I won’t say analyze it, but see the dynamics and help me figure out why I’m doing something in a certain way. 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.
Tom Heintjes: Contrast Aaron’s upbringing with your daughter’s, Kate.
Lynn Johnston: 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. When I had her, I was happy, and when you’re happy, you can look in the mirror and say, “You know, I’m not so bad.” But when Aaron was born, it was different. My husband would say things to me like my mother did. “You’re fat and ugly.” And he treated me like garbage. His girlfriends would call him at home, and when I would pick up the phone, they would giggle at me. And I would look in the mirror then and say to myself, “If only I were pretty. If only I were thin.” So I decided to get thin, and boy, did I get thin—I went down to 110 pounds. I was anorexic. I would go to bed and my stomach would be cramped.
Tom Heintjes: What cured you of the anorexia?
Lynn Johnston: I think it was because a friend of mine did the same thing. We would call each other late at night and say, “I’m starving, are you starving? OK, don’t eat anything and I won’t, either.”
Tom Heintjes: You were each other’s codependent.
Lynn Johnston: That’s right. She was from Germany. Her name was Brunhilda. She ran away from home to come to Canada, and we became best friends. We went on this incredible diet where we both became skeletons. I remember looking at her at one point and saying, “You look terrible!” Here we were, trying to become the models we saw in magazines. We wanted the pointed hips and the angular elbows—we looked like Biafrans.
When I first met Bernie, she was wonderful, sexy, beautiful . . . every man’s dream. She wasn’t fat, but she was rounded, just a delicious-looking woman. Beautiful blue eyes, just perfect. And here she was after this diet, her back covered with bumps from her spine.
Tom Heintjes: I don’t imagine that you were much better off.
Lynn Johnston: No, I wasn’t. But I looked at my friend Bernie and said, “This is it, we’re killing ourselves.” I quit dieting, and she didn’t. Her period stopped, and she just got worse.
Tom Heintjes: What ultimately happened to her?
Lynn Johnston: She married a doctor, and that was a crazy relationship. They moved back to Germany, where they split up, and I lost touch with her. I know her father owned a pub in Germany, and I have a crazy idea that she’s working at that pub. I’d love to go there and see her again; she was a wonderful person.
Tom Heintjes: You are a very successful, much-admired woman. And yet, you suffered so much in your childhood and early adulthood. Since so much of a person’s self-esteem is formed during this period, I wonder how you feel about yourself now.
Lynn Johnston: 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.
Years ago, one person wrote to me and accused me of being an amateur psychologist. I wrote back to her and said, “Yes, I am an amateur psychologist.” We all are. That’s how we get through life. That’s how we figure out our relationships with people. And I wrote to her, “As an amateur psychologist, I wonder what is upsetting you so much that you would be angered by a comic strip? What else in your life is upsetting you?” I’m sure she was miffed by that.
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. At 46, I’m still making mistakes, but I really think people are enriched by the bad stuff, and it should not motivate you to do bad stuff in return. I’m a product of my home, and I have wonderful friends, a wonderful husband and a wonderful family. All of that is good. I could easily have been torn apart by another bad marriage. I was just so lucky to have a wonderful life after a tough marriage. 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.
Tom Heintjes: That’s what prompted my question, because in years past you seemed not to really like yourself a whole lot.
Johnston: Oh, I didn’t. And I still don’t. 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. The Lawrence series has been a very humbling experience!
Tom Heintjes: I want to switch gears here and talk about your early interest in comics. I find it interesting that some of your earliest comic influences were comic books, and not comic strips. In fact, you and I share some of the same early favorites—Little Lulu, Uncle Scrooge, Mad magazine.
Lynn Johnston: Well, those were all fantasy comics. I was never interested in superheroes, though. In the superhero comics the men were always all-powerful, and I was surrounded by weak men. My father was meek, and every male teacher at school that I could browbeat into tears, I did. The men were my adversaries, in a sense.
Tom Heintjes: Did you enjoy Wonder Woman comics?
Lynn Johnston: No. Wonder Woman was perfect, and I was fat and ugly. I knew I could never look like that, so I didn’t want to look at her. 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. Or Scrooge McDuck with his money bin. I loved all that stuff. It was wonderful fantasy that seemed achievable by a child. And it wasn’t ugly. There were no villains with guns. The bad guys were the ones who were going to steal your lunch money, or who were going to stop it from raining forever.
Tom Heintjes: Were comics permissible in your household when you were a child?
Lynn Johnston: Yes they were, all the time. Because they were creative. The only thing that caused a problem was Mad, and that was only with my mother, because my father had a more raucous sense of humor.
Tom Heintjes: At that time, Mad must have seemed like an underground comic.
Lynn Johnston: It was absolutely an underground comic. To my mother, it was like having a porno magazine. It was gross. She also didn’t approve of The Three Stooges because they were so coarse. My mother was a lady.
My grandfather had been a philatelist for King George V. He was probably one of the leading experts on forgeries. My grandmother was an opera singer who worked for a portrait painter who worked for the royal family. So of course they hobnobbed with the upper crust. And my mother married a guy whose father was a shipyard worker in Collingwood, Ontario. My father’s vocabulary was so big only because he was a voracious reader and taught himself to speak properly. So my mother was from the aristocracy and my father was from the bush, so she was shocked when we were captivated by something as crass as The Three Stooges. One time I whacked my brother over the head with a piece of celery to see if it would shatter as effectively in reality as it did when The Three Stooges did it, and it did! It has to be fresh, though. [laughter]
Tom Heintjes: Did you ever poke him in the eyes?
Lynn Johnston: No, but my brother and I tried to kill each other many times. My father would encourage us to stage-fight behind my mother’s back. He knew how to do the pratfalls without hurting himself, and he didn’t mind The Three Stooges.
Tom Heintjes: What sort of creative influence did comics have on you? Did you ever try tracing any of your favorites?
Lynn Johnston: No, never. I never wanted to trace people’s work. I would try to draw cartoons from time to time based on other peoples’ stuff, but I just wasn’t happy copying anybody. If I took elements of anybody’s work, it was Len Norris of the Vancouver Sun. He was my father’s absolute idol; he just adored the man and had all of his books. He was an editorial cartoonist, and his drawing was just exquisite. It had a British sort of sarcasm to it. He had been an architect, so his renderings were just absolutely beautiful. He always gave you extra stuff to look at. If there was a painting on the wall of the ocean and the painting was tilted, the water was still perfectly horizontal. If there was a bird cage, all you would see of the bird was its feet, because it was obviously dead. I always appreciated that, because not only did you have all of these extra jokes, but you had 10 minutes of looking at all of these drawing thrills.
Tom Heintjes: You’ve mentioned in the past that your grandfather would sort of pontificate on each of the Sunday comics, and you differed with him over Peanuts.
Lynn Johnston: Well, when I was a kid, my grandfather was not a nice guy. If you talked to other people who knew him, he was a great guy with a sense of humor, and he was somebody they enjoyed knowing. But to me, he was a sadistic, black, haughty, unattainable ogre. I always felt his disappointment in me. I hated him and wanted him to love me at the same time. As a child, you work so hard for the approval of a grandparent or a parent. You want them to love you, and you’ll do anything, even if it means being silly or acting out. You want them to notice you and you want them to care, even if it’s not positive care. You want something out of them.
My grandfather used to lavish all sorts of attention and affection on my brother, while he virtually ignored me. He would give my brother 50 cents and he would give me a nickel. Right in front of each other.
My grandparents lived on this wonderful piece of property that ran up to the train tracks behind their house. It overlooked a very rocky landscape. Behind the house they had peach trees, and we would grab the peaches and wait for the train to go by, and if the peaches were rotten enough, they would smack off those passenger trains’ windows like you wouldn’t believe! [laughter] We’d get bulls-eyes and yell “Yahoo!” And that seed in the middle of the peach would hit the window with that satisfying “click.” One day in the peach trees I found a robin’s nest with a perfect little robin’s egg in it. I came running down the hill with it, and my grandfather was sitting in front of the house with my brother, and they were making string baskets with their fingers. I guess I was about 8 and my brother was about 6. Anyway, I said, “Look what I found! Look what I found!” I was so excited! And my grandfather said, “The way to keep this is to make a tiny hole in the end of it and blow the material out so you can preserve the shell.” So he got a needle from the house, and I was so excited that I would have this robin’s egg. As he was about to puncture it with his needle, he turned to my brother and said, “And I will give this to you.” And I said, “But I found it! It’s mine!” And my grandfather turned to my brother and said, “As I said, I will give this to you.” Then he lifted up the bird’s egg close enough to his face so he could see what he was doing, and he popped the needle in, and the egg must have been rotten, because it blew up in his face and covered it in the yuckiest muck. I was thrilled! I remember thinking, “There is a God.”
Tom Heintjes: Wow—that is perfect!
Lynn Johnston: But you see, I wanted his approval. I would do anything for his approval, because as a grandparent I saw him every other weekend. No child wants to be out in the cold. My grandfather loved the comics, and he would analyze the Sunday comics. This was something between him and me, because my brother never cared for the comics. He would analyze Pogo, and he would analyze Momma and Miss Peach. He would talk about why they were drawn that way and what the artist really meant. I was into this, because it was attention from him.
I remember thinking that nothing could be worse than Henry. It was boring to read, it was drawn so boring, his tongue would appear out of his chin when he was eating an ice cream cone. I remember thinking, “I could do better than that.” That’s the sort of thing that really spurs you on to try it.
The one strip my grandfather really didn’t like was Peanuts. Now, I remember when Peanuts first appeared in our paper. It was in the mid-’50s. I was sitting next to my grandfather on the couch, really enjoying the fact that I was close to him, it was warm, and he wasn’t pushing me away. He was going through the comics, and I always tried to agree with him, just to make him happy. He finally came to Peanuts, and it was a strip where Charlie Brown talks about how depressed he is, and Lucy comes out with a smart remark, and my grandfather said, “No child talks like that. No child has these thoughts. This is ridiculous.” And I thought, “You’re wrong. We may not use the same words, but we have the same thoughts and the same feelings.” Everything about that strip seemed right. And what appealed to me about it more than anything is that all the women were strong! Lucy was a crank, but she was strong! Peppermint Patty could go out there and play ice hockey and win! One thing I know about Charles Schulz is that he really likes strong women. Many women in his life have been strong. He’s encouraged his daughters to be strong, as well.
I think he was taking little risks in the strip. You know, there’s a formula to comic art, a formula to the gag. It’s not predictable necessarily, but there is nevertheless a formula. I think Charles Schulz was willing to forgo that formula with punchlines like “Whatever . . .” and the psychiatrist’s 5-cent booth.
Tom Heintjes: The characters would cast their eyes upward in response to a remark—that was all new.
Lynn Johnston: Right! I was looking in a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and they only give him two quotes out of the whole thing. Of course, they only give Jesus one. And I said to myself that I was going to take five minutes and come up with more than two quotations. So I opened up—I think it was the 35th anniversary—book, and in five minutes I wrote down six or so others that could really have been in Bartlett’s. They were really fine, brilliant, quotable quotes. And I told that to him. I couldn’t believe they gave him only two quotes. Cathy Guisewite is someone else who writes very quotable quotes. Why aren’t they in Bartlett’s Friggin’ Quotations? They’ve got all these things by Aristotle that no one ever heard of before.
Tom Heintjes: I think it all comes down to something that you and I and everyone who loves comics have to battle on a daily basis, and that is the general public’s dismissal and trivialization of anything associated with comics. I was showing some of my cartoon work to a coworker who is a fine artist. She didn’t really know I could draw before I showed her my stuff, and she looked at it and said, “Wow, Tom, if you have this kind of talent you might be able to do some real art one day!” And she wasn’t trying to offend me. It was just a natural thing for her to say, because it was comics and therefore not “real” art.
Lynn Johnston: She actually said that to you . . . wow. Here’s an anecdote for you. The first time I went up to Charles Schulz’s house, the first time I had spent any real time with him, the first thing he wanted to show me was a drawing he had done of a street in France he had seen while he was there during the war. I looked at this beautiful, sensitive illustration of the houses and the cars, and he looked at me and said, “I really can draw.” All of us feel that way.
The editorial cartoonists razz us, and we razz them. They say to us, “You don’t have these tight deadlines every day, and you don’t always have to be topical, you can do stories about whatever you want. You can draw a strip and then go play golf.” And we say to them, “Yeah, but you have an infinite amount of resource material, and you have real space to draw in! We have these little postage-stamp areas, one-third of which has to be the dialogue.”
Tom Heintjes: That leads me to my next question. You obviously have a real passion for drawing. It shows in everything you do. Do you ever feel constrained by the size of the strip?
Lynn Johnston: Not really. I’ve found that I can use that space effectively. I do think, though, that if they reduced it any more I would simply throw my hands up in the air and find another business. We’d lose our readers. Most people can’t see that small.
Tom Heintjes: I want to talk about For Better Or For Worse, just in case you thought we were never going to get around to it. Tell me about your early career in cartooning, and how this eventually manifested itself into the strip.
Lynn Johnston: When I was a kid, I always cartooned. When you’re a kid, you eat when you’re hungry and you laugh when you’re happy and you do stuff on the spur of the moment that’s a thrill. I cartooned. It was something I did without thinking about it. So when I went to art school, it was the linear, visual arts that intrigued me and the commercial art was the thing that came closest. I was not going to be a painter, and I was not going to be one of these experimental artists who cast body parts in rubber. I wanted to do something that was fast and funny people of all ages. There are teachers who are going over this a day at a time with their students, with the approval of the students’ parents. They’re writing and phoning to tell me that it’s an educational tool. One letter was from a mother who said that because of the strip, her son had the courage to tell her that he was a homosexual, and because of the strip, she had the courage to handle it well. I also got a letter from a woman in Edmonton who said that if the strip had run last year, perhaps her son would still be alive, because then he would know that he was not the only one in the world with this problem.
It’s that kind of response that makes me think it’s been worth the roller-coaster ride it’s put me on. It would be so much easier not to make a statement, not to tell a story, to continue to be that yellowing page on the refrigerator.
Tom Heintjes: If you had it to do all over again, would you have proceeded with the story?
Lynn Johnston: Yes, despite the fact that it has been quite horrible. I have not slept, I have not eaten, I’ve lost 10 pounds, I’ve lost 19 papers, I’ve lost many readers. It was not something I did for joy, or something I did for publicity. I did not say, “Damn the detractors” and go ahead, intending to upset the editors. I did it because it was a story I really, fully believed in, and when you write a story that is perhaps a controversial one, you have to expect to take the heat. And I have. And I also have to realize how soft I am. I am not unmoved by the spears and arrows that are coming through the mail. I’m not immune to those. It absolutely is an attack on me, and it’s from people who are thinking, feeling people. As a cartoonist who is very optimistic and who wants to be approved of, I am not unaffected by it. It has been an ordeal. Again, I’ve lost 10 pounds.
Tom Heintjes: A new quick weight-loss method! [laughter]
Lynn Johnston: I figure that if I ever get fat again, I’ll do the abortion issue. [laughter] It’s pretty well gone. I can feel all my ribs.
Tom Heintjes: What has the reaction of your colleagues been?
Lynn Johnston: I talked to Mike Peters yesterday, and he said it’s not very often that a cartoonist can make such an overwhelming statement and influence so many people to talk, whether it’s for or against what you say. It’s an issue that needs to be talked about. He said, “You’ve made people talk, and that’s a very enviable position for a cartoonist.”
Tom Heintjes: Probably the only cartoonist who does that on any sort of regular basis is Garry Trudeau.
Lynn Johnston: I spoke to Garry Trudeau. I called him up and said, “Well, Garry, now I know just a little bit about what your life is like.” He laughed and said, “They’ve given up on me. They still held out hope that you could be another gag-a-day cartoonist, but they long ago gave up hope on me.” He also said that most people don’t realize how thoroughly he researches everything he writes about. When he puts something in the paper that is very pointed and of a name-dropping nature, it is not done without hours and hours of thorough research. He said he knows that he has detractors, but he said that he’s always confident that he’s told the truth as he sees it. He was very comforting, and he said, “If you want to make a statement, you have to make it with all honesty and truth and be comforted knowing that it was made with your own strong sense of values and truth.”
Tom Heintjes: You’re handling this sequence so deftly and so honestly, with a perceptiveness that seems so authentic. I’m left wondering if you simply wrote it from out of your imagination.
Lynn Johnston: I didn’t. I wrote it from experience. My brother-in-law is gay. It certainly has not been by design, but so very many of my friends have been gay, all the way through school, art school, even in my husband’s dental class—our very best friend, who graduated with Rod, was gay and is now HIV-positive. He’s been thrown out of his home. We’ve been part of the private lives of so many people who have had to deal with this. I know this story. I know it’s a true one, and I know the dialogue by heart.
Tom Heintjes: That explains why it seemed so palpably real.
Lynn Johnston: It is real. That’s why I can stand tall and know that I am not making up a story simply to shock people. I produced a story that is so true that it’s painful. You know what it’s like? It’s like lancing a boil and taking out the thing that won’t allow it to heal. Not that I intended to do that, but I had the confidence that I could tell this story from the side of the people who had experience. In that way, I was being very true to myself, my strip and to them. The strip’s always been very honest.
Tom Heintjes: Have you heard from any other colleagues?
Lynn Johnston: Well, the first person I sent it to, before I sent it to anyone else, was Sparky. We tease each other all the time, because we’re forever giving each other advice, and we never follow each other’s advice. But if he had said to me, “Do not do this,” I wonder if I would have. But he said, “This is good, and it deserves publication.” He’s been doing interviews to that effect. I have never mentioned his name, because I never wanted to involve anyone else in my situation, but I suppose reporters called Sparky because they wanted to get the point of view of someone they respect. He called me yesterday and said, “I’ve been doing interviews because of you!” [laughter] Of course, he’s been very supportive.
I spoke to Greg Evans, who does Luann, and he’s another cartoonist who has touched on some issues. Like myself, Greg is a very gentle soul who doesn’t enjoy controversy and doesn’t like the angry letters. He was feeling for me. I told him yesterday what a roller-coaster it’s been, and I was feeling pretty down. He sympathized with me, and we talked about how comic strips are changing and how far we have to push that envelope. He said he believes we have to nudge that envelope once in a while, but that he wasn’t prepared to nudge it as far as I did.
I also talked to Bill Amend, who does Fox Trot. He said that although he really wants to cover real issues, he wasn’t prepared to push the envelope. Now, I’ve always felt that way as well. I have always strongly pursued the laughs, but my thoughts never pursued the laughs. The laughs always became a more objective look, or the other side of the coin. I didn’t think that I would do something as radical as this. I knew that I would eventually touch this subject, but I never saw myself in the situation I’m in now. But perhaps that will happen to Greg, and perhaps that will happen to Bill. Perhaps one day they will feel very strongly about something and write what is in their hearts, and they too will discover that there are readers out there who are intolerant, who just want their laugh a day.
Tom Heintjes: Do you think that what is happening to you will serve as a disincentive for comics creators to deal with their characters in a mature, realistic way?
Lynn Johnston: I think that something like this always sets some kind of a limit, always sets some kind of an example. I will be interested to see what other people will do. But at the same time, people who do comic strips are very optimistic, very easy-going people who generally want to be loved and approved of. So I can’t see anything being done without love and care, and if cartoonists are going to do more relevant work, it will always be done within the context of family entertainment. I don’t think it will become the deplorable, very basic humor you see on television, which has to say gross, four-letter things to elicit a laugh. People have been programmed to laugh at smut. I am so thrilled with Comedy on the Road and Caroline’s Comedy Hour on A&E because these people are forced to be clean in their humor, and they are generally funny.
I am very prudish. I am very conservative. I believe that sex is a private thing, and that all of this gulping, gasping muck you see on television is too much.
Tom Heintjes: When you describe yourself as “conservative,” how do you mean that?
Lynn Johnston: I don’t go to Dangerfield’s in New York and laugh at the smut and filth they think is funny. Now, I love a dirty joke if it’s really funny, but I can’t laugh at filth anymore.
I’m a very objective, open-minded, “mom” type of person. I’m modest in my dress, I’m modest in the way I speak, and I’m modest in so many ways.
Tom Heintjes: Let me ask a couple of quantifiable questions: how many papers are dropping only the sequence, and how many are dropping the strip for ever and ever?
Lynn Johnston: I believe 40 or 50 took alternate material, but they haven’t dropped the strip. Nineteen have dropped the strip for ever and ever, amen.
Tom Heintjes: What was supplied to the papers who elected to run alternate material?
Lynn Johnston: They chose a five-week run from 1991, something that fit right into that slot. And I don’t know what the breakdown of dollars is—I don’t know if Universal charged them for it; I never asked. I may well be charged for a great deal of this. It’s a expense that we share.
Tom Heintjes: As if creating For Better Or For Worse doesn’t keep you busy enough, now you’re having to cope with this.
Lynn Johnston: It’s starting to die down now. The phone never stopped ringing for the first couple of weeks. I would hang up the phone and it would instantly ring again, to the point where I had to take the phone off the hook just to take a shower, eat a lunch, do anything.
Tom Heintjes: Did you resort to screening your calls?
Lynn Johnston: I did leave my answering machine on for a while, but the calls were almost all from editors and reporters, and I wanted to talk to them. I thought that if I’m going to produce this material that causes them a lot of phone calls, then I have to respond to them and be there for them. They need my support as well.
Tom Heintjes: How did you get any real work done?
Lynn Johnston: I didn’t. What was wonderful was that somehow I had been able to get a couple of weeks ahead, so I could afford to lose the time. And I did lose the two weeks. For two solid weeks, I answered the phone all day on the same subject.
Tom Heintjes: I imagine your household was in something of an uproar.
Lynn Johnston: It was! We were all in a state of shock, but now we’re looking forward to it all being over. Enough is enough, especially for my husband, who has his own concerns. He runs a very busy clinic with a huge staff, and he’s got his own worries and anxieties, and he would very much like me to rub his back and ask him, “How was your day?” I say to him, “I turned down Good Morning America and Maury Povich today.” And he says, “Uh, I had a banana with lunch today.” [laughter] It’s been difficult for him to be undermined as part of my life. This has taken over my life for the past two weeks.
Tom Heintjes: Have media outlets that large really been wanting you to appear?
Lynn Johnston: Oh sure—Today, Good Morning America, Maury Povich, The National, which is huge in Canada. But I turned them all down. I work in a print medium, and I am responsible to our client newspapers and to others who want to talk about this in the print medium. I felt that once I went on television, it would look as if I were crusading, that I am there for purposes other than writing a good story.
Tom Heintjes: Next thing you know, you’d be known as “Lynn Johnston, AIDS activist.”
Lynn Johnston: Yeah, something like that. I didn’t want that to happen. I felt that the people who are in the forefront of this movement will take up the battle. If this has done anything to open a door, they’ll go through the door themselves. I want to do comics.
Tom Heintjes: You’ve discussed the pleasure that rendering things like razor stubble, bulges, baggy eyes and things like that bring to you. Why is that? What does it all signify to you?
Lynn Johnston: [laughter] Because it diminishes the stuff that’s really there. I am not an overweight person. I am the typical 10 pounds overweight that every 46-year-old woman is. I have 10 pounds to lose. But there are days when those 10 pounds hang off me like great rubber dewlaps. And there are some days when it is insignificant. On the days when I feel like Roseanne Barr, I draw it, and it feels great! It’s like when there’s a bald-headed comedian, the first thing he’s going to do is draw attention to the fact that he’s bald. “No one is going to hurt me, because I’m going to call attention to it myself first.” Once the hurt is dealt with and gone, then we can get down to the fun of the comedy. People will think, “Why can’t I be as capable as this guy is at dealing with his shortcomings?” If Phyllis Diller didn’t feel like an ugly person, she never would have made those wonderful comments. If she hadn’t felt ugly, she never would have said anything.
Phyllis wouldn’t want you to find out from another source that she’d had a facelift. She’s going to tell you about it, and you’re going to crack up over it. Then it will be dealt with, and then we can get down to the other stuff. I don’t like being 10 pounds overweight. I would like to look as perfect as the women in the magazines. So when I draw that ugly character, it feels wonderful, because . . . remember when I said that if you shut your eyes, the hurt and anger and blackness go on forever, but if you put it down on paper you can deal with it? So I draw this saggy, baggy character, and it looks so funny! I could never look that bad! I can laugh at that.
People say to me, “Lynn, you’re so attractive! Why do you draw Elly so ugly?” Well shoot, there’s a reason right there! [laughter]
Tom Heintjes: Do you ever get the feeling that your family thinks you’re looking at them, waiting for material to happen?
Lynn Johnston: Never. That would be like looking at an oven, waiting for a cake to happen. You have to make it up.
Tom Heintjes: That question came to my mind recently when I was reading about the early days of Motown and the success of the songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland. One of them said that people felt self-conscious talking to him because they felt he was always waiting for someone to say something that would trigger a song lyric in his mind.
Lynn Johnston: I think they were lying. I think that what they were really hoping is that they would say something that would trigger a song idea in his head and they could forever say they were responsible for that. That’s what happens to me. Every day I get a letter from someone who says, “This morning, little Rupert said this gem over his Shreddies, and I think you could use it.” Well, I don’t, but they’re hoping that you will. People do affect you in that they are your material and you record what’s going on all the time. If you’re having a tense, deep, tear-filled discussion with a best friend, you’re not going to chronicle that in the paper, but you’re going to observe the way they furrow their brows. Not because you’re an analyst, but because you’re on ’record’ all the time. I remember crying really deeply, walking over to the mirror and thinking, “Wow—that’s what I look like.” The way they fold their arms, put their elbows on the table, all of that goes into your memory. And what you are is an actor, and you’re getting the body language of your characters down. Wonderful little things like a baby leaning out of a shopping cart saying “Want dat, want dat” goes into “record.”
Tom Heintjes: The characters’ body language adds so much to the feel of a strip. You know, I make no secret of my profound admiration for Will Eisner. In the years I’ve worked with him writing a column for The Spirit, he’s taught me so much about how the medium works, and one thing he always stresses is that not only does the dialogue convey character, so does the character’s body language.
Lynn Johnston: Will Eisner is the artist’s artist. He is one of the best. You look at his work and you wonder, “How could anybody do so much with lines and shadows?” He not only gives a beautifully structured image, he gives you an emotion. And he is a consummate actor.
Tom Heintjes: I think one of his earliest contributions to comics was his portrayal of very strong women who could make their way in the world without men. And this was in the ’40s, when this wasn’t done much, especially in comics.
Lynn Johnston: I also think he was an innovator because he created women who had a certain anatomical credence. They were idealized, sure, but they were achievable. They weren’t Wonder Woman bodies.
At one NCS convention, I was sitting at the same table with him, and I was looking at his hands. His hands are wonderful.
Tom Heintjes: They look like the hands of a man half his age.
Lynn Johnston: One time, I was walking down the street with Charles Schulz and he took me by the hand. I remember as I swung my left hand forward, I thought, “The hand that draws Peanuts is holding mine.” It was such a thrill. So we hold hands all the time now. [laughter]
Tom Heintjes: I’ve been thinking recently about how, in some ways, taboos in comics are being shattered. But its a “two steps forward, one step back” process. No newspaper cartoonist today could render the kinds of women Eisner and Milton Caniff did back in the ’40s. Do you perceive a shattering of taboos in comics today?
Johnston: Women were idols then. Today, we are shattering every idol we ever had. They have now sent Kitty Kelley to England to destroy Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth. We’re really happy shattering our idols. We’re happy destroying the Kennedy family. We all know they have multiple warts, but why can’t we just leave JFK as a god? Let us have our heroes. And women are shattered every day on television screens.
In the time of Milton Caniff, even though women were drawn with a sensuous stroke, there was still an ideal of reverence toward women. That they were all virgins until proven otherwise. You would open a door for them. You wouldn’t swear in front of them. There was a sense of courtesy and chivalry, which I can still appreciate.
Tom Heintjes: What is harder for you—writing or drawing?
Lynn Johnston: Writing.
Tom Heintjes: Why?
Lynn Johnston: It’s the thing that furrows my brow, upsets my stomach and takes the longest.
Tom Heintjes: What method do you use to write?
Lynn Johnston: I write dialogue the way you would for a sitcom. I put the family in a situation, and I exist as a phantom in the room, and I hear them speak and I watch them move, and I follow them around, and I wait for the things to happen. Some things I coerce into happening, and some things happen spontaneously. I often never know where this completely independent family is going to take me. The stories often write themselves. It’s a wakeful dream state. Mike Peters says the same thing. Even Joan Rivers admitted the same thing. When you’re writing, it’s like you’re under a general anesthetic, where you’ll wake up and say, “I don’t believe it—the sun went down!” It’s like a state of suspended animation. You are transported into a dream state so your body exists as a shell during the time you’re writing.
When the character April was born, a group of eight of my women friends decided to give me a surprise baby shower, and the day they planned it was a writing day. I was sitting in my studio, and my studio overlooks our driveway. Four cars pulled into my driveway, and people walked into my living room, and I still didn’t know they were there. One of the women walked into my studio and said, “Lynn, there’s something I want to show you.” I said, “Hi Beth, how are you?” not noticing that someone had walked into my house. When she led me into the living room, I had to blink several times before I could adjust to the fact that my living room was full of balloons and friends and gifts! That’s how anesthetized you are. When I draw, I can talk to a friend, I can listen to the radio, I can talk on the phone, because it’s like dancing to a tune I’ve loved to dance to before.
Tom Heintjes: So you’re never just walking through the mall when a gag comes to you.
Lynn Johnston: Sure! And when that happens, it’s wonderful. More than likely, it’s the state of mind you’re in. There are times when I intend to write and nothing happens. Then there are other times when I have the flu and I feel crummy and depressed, and I write two weeks’ worth of stuff. About two weeks ago, I came up with 11 Sunday comics in one day! And you wonder, if there is some spiritual connection here, where were you guys last week?
I like complete quiet when I write, though. I have to have no interruptions. I can’t work if there’s background noise. Well, that’s not always true. We live in a forest, and there were a number of trees that were dead, and they were in danger of falling over onto the house. So we had a couple of guys come over and take them down. They chainsawed all those trees as I wrote, and I didn’t see them and I didn’t hear them. I went outside later at about two o’clock and said, “Holy smoke, look at all the trees you cut down!” They said, “You were right there by the window the whole time!” And I never even was aware of any of it—the noise, the chatter, the trees falling, nothing. But that’s unusual. Normally I have complete quiet. If I played a radio, I’d hear snippets of conversation or song lyrics that would distract me.
Tom Heintjes: How is it different when you draw?
Lynn Johnston: When I draw, I have a studio that is very small, with a drafting table I’ve had for 25 years. On top of that I have one of those cutting mats. I like to work on a cutting mat because I often will cut things out and reshape them. I often make greeting cards for friends—I’m forever making little things like that—and I like to have a cutting mat for those things, too. I listen to the radio when I draw. I like to listen to the CBC because it’s got all kinds of comedy and radio plays and commentary and phone-in shows. It gives me a sense of connection to the outside world. I know some artists have a TV on. John Reiner, who inks The Lockhorns, has a TV on while he works, but I can’t imagine having a visual stimulus in the room—unless it’s my dog!
I know Sparky likes absolute silence when he draws, because he draws and thinks up new material at the same time. One time I was out in California and I was late on my deadlines and I had all kinds of things to do. I said to him, “Look, I’m just going to stay in the hotel and work.” He said, “Why don’t you use my studio? I’ll give you half my studio space.” And I told him I didn’t want to, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. And he insisted—but he said, “I don’t want you to play a radio, I don’t want you to talk to me, I don’t want you to come over to my side, I want you to just mind your own business and stick to your side of the studio.” And I said, “OK, that’s fine. You won’t bug me and I won’t bug you.” He was over talking to me every five minutes! [laughter]
Tom Heintjes: Is there anything you hate to draw, anything you’ll go out of your way to avoid drawing?
Lynn Johnston: I used to hate drawing feet. Now I’ve practiced them so much that I think I do them fairly well.
Tom Heintjes: Is it shoes you dislike drawing or bare feet?
Lynn Johnston: Shoes more than bare feet. Shoes are very difficult for me. I find that hands aren’t difficult for me at all, but for some artists they’re difficult. The other thing I hate to draw is bicycles. One of the problems I have with my character in a wheelchair is that I hate to draw the doggone wheelchair! That was a whole insight to me. There are a whole bunch of disabled people who are saying, “We’re here! Draw us! Joke about us, have fun with us! We have funny things to talk about, too—don’t ignore us!” And I want to say, “I want to draw you, but I can’t draw your chair!” [laughter] It’s not so difficult drawing someone who’s sitting down; it’s difficult drawing all those levers and wheels and lines.
Tom Heintjes: Have you ever done a piece of work and felt so good about it that you’ve said, “This is it—I can’t get better than this”?
Lynn Johnston: I have done work that I feel that good about, but what I say to myself is, “I look forward to the day when I do the level of work again.” You know how it is when it’s another regular, ordinary day, and then out of the blue someone phones you who you haven’t heard from in years, or somebody invites you to something, and you say, “Wow! Isn’t this great! Thank you for calling me—you’ve made my day!” You don’t hang up the phone saying, “Well, that’ll never happen again.” You just look forward to it happening again someday.
Every day it’s a joy. Every day it’s a surprise package. There are some days when my work is so covered with white-out that I don’t want anyone to see it. And there are days when I can write and I feel pretty smug. There are also days when I feel like I’m going to quit and go work at Woolco. Or “It’s gone—I’ve used it all up!” The trick is to stay far ahead enough of the deadlines so when you hit a dry spell, you can survive them with confidence.
Tom Heintjes: How do you deal with writer’s block?
Lynn Johnston: I try to switch to another channel in my “computer programming.” If I’m having a real hard time doing dailies, I’ll do a Sunday. If I’m doing a storyline and I can’t figure out how to segue from school to the kitchen, I’ll put it aside and let my mind drift or do work on a Sunday. If it’s one of those days when nothing is happening, I have all kinds of other things I need to do—answer my fan mail, do illustrations for people I know who are getting married . . .
Tom Heintjes: Even work for Hogan’s Alley...
Lynn Johnston: Well, yes. [laughter] That’s the kind of stuff I will do when the gas has run out.
Tom Heintjes: Which do you enjoy creating more—a daily or a Sunday?
Lynn Johnston: I enjoy both. I often think the Sundays are funnier, because they stand alone. In a week of dailies, I might have two humorous one and the rest are thoughtful ones. The Sundays are, if not humorous, at least wry. And I never, ever connect them into the storylines I do in the dailies. So I suppose that for something you would want to own for your wall, the Sundays are a much more whole statement.
Tom Heintjes: Do you ever want to do something apart from the slice-of-life humor of For Better Or For Worse?
Lynn Johnston: I am doing other types of material. I do a comic panel called Chuffers about an old guy who has a train. My husband is a model railroad fanatic, and he goes to conventions and meetings and builds trains to ride on. He’s spent time on movie-studio lots while they blow up trains. The guy is train-bonkers. He does a quarterly article for LGB Magazine, so I figure, “Well, if he played golf, I’d play golf,” so I do a regular cartoon for this magazine. I do greeting cards for the clinic, and it’s fun to do. It’s like changing from one exercise to another.
Tom Heintjes: Do you find that it gets something out of your system that otherwise wouldn’t be gotten out?
Lynn Johnston: Yes—I get to draw things other than For Better Or For Worse! I find that what I need almost more than anything else is connection with other cartoonists. It’s like a self-help group. Very few people know what we go through. Look at a famous actress. Everyone says, “Oh, I wish I were you—you’re beautiful, you’re glamorous.” But from her point of view, it’s “I work so hard, I don’t have a family life, I’m hounded and I have no privacy.” The only people who can understand how they live are other actors. And cartoonists can say to each other, “God, I couldn’t think of a thing last week.” One editorial cartoonist told me that he’s so engrossed when he’s working that he doesn’t know he’s ignoring his wife until she bursts into tears and runs out of the room. He was so focused on what he was doing that he didn’t hear her say, “I’m depressed and I need to talk to you.” So we all get together and we commiserate. And Rod gets together with the other cartoonists’ spouses and says, “Living with these people is a zoo!” because they not only live with us, they live with the fantasy world we create.
If I think my husband is angry at me and doesn’t want to talk about it, I’ll argue and make his half of the argument up while he’s at work. I do it every day for my work anyway! And by the time he comes home from work, I’m furious! “You said this, and then you said that! And when I said this, you said that!” So cartoonists can be very difficult to live with.
I remember the first time I went to a Reuben Award ceremony. I thought it would be like a Hollywood gala, with air-kisses and “Hello, dahling!” I’m sure Hollywood isn’t really like that, but that’s the popular impression. The public is driven to believe that there’s a lot of superficiality in Hollywood and that nobody trusts anybody and there’s no true friendship there. If someone says “Welcome,” it’s because they really just want your job. I never expected the joyous feeling at the Reubens, the feeling that we all knew each other. How can you read Cathy and not feel like you knew Cathy Guisewite? How can you read Peanuts and not have a sense of what Charles Schulz is like? Or even Garfield? Jim is as sarcastic as Garfield can be from time to time. When I went to this thing, I was overwhelmed by the sense of family and acceptance. And affection for my work as well. The competition is between the salesmen. If my salesman is trying to get an editor to drop Blondie for For Better Or For Worse and says terrible things about Blondie to try to persuade him, I don’t hear it. If his agent goes to an editor and says about For Better Or For Worse, “Are you carrying that moralistic crap? Why don’t you give them Blondie, which is a proven strip that people have laughed at for decades.” We don’t hear that. So we can be wonderfully good friends. You get charged up by each other.
When I first saw Calvin & Hobbes, the first thing I thought was, “This guy can draw!” And I desperately wanted to meet him and shake his hand and see his studio. I think that when he began that strip, another era started. I talked to Bill not long ago, and he said, “What worries me about the fantasy aspect of Calvin & Hobbes is that people think I’ve cornered the market on fantasy. And if someone thinks up a character who sometimes goes into a fantasy world, they’re accused of copying me.” And he said he never invented the idea of a fantasy life—that was invented thousands of years ago, with the invention of people.
Tom Heintjes: What is your daily schedule like?
Lynn Johnston: I work 9 to 5 every single day. I have a deadline, and I make sure I am so many weeks ahead of that deadline. If it means that I work late one day so I can take off early another day, I do that. I almost never take a morning off. This is the first morning I’ve taken off in more than two years. It’s a full-time job. I have an assistant who comes in three days a week, and she does the Zip-a-tone, she colors all my Sundays, files and helps with the mail and she does our business. She doesn’t do any drawing. Between the two of us, we have a full-time job here.
Tom Heintjes: Does she choose all the Zip-a-tone patterns?
Lynn Johnston: Yes.
Tom Heintjes: It’s all up to her.
Lynn Johnston: That’s right.
Tom Heintjes: Do you break your day up in some way, like morning is pencilling, afternoon is inking? How do you structure your day?
Lynn Johnston: I will have a writing day. For example, the last two days have been writing days. I have a sun room that has some plants, a reclining chair and a coffee table, and I’ll sit in there and I write. When I have written the number of weeks that I am comfortable with, then I pencil. A good day for me is to write a week’s worth of dailies. I’m happy with that. If I can write two weeks’ worth of dailies in a day, that’s a great day, and I’m tap-dancing at the end of it. The next day, I often find my batteries are too low to concentrate on drawing what I wrote, so I’ll do other things, like answer mail. The next day, I’ll be ready to do the drawing. And I can pencil two weeks in a day, and that’s pretty exhausting. Then I can ink two weeks in a day. It takes Nathalie a full day to do all the Zip-a-tone. Then, of course, I have all my Sundays to do, so it is a full-time job. People say, “Well, you just do a drawing a day and then goof off,” they don’t realize that it’s a technical feat just to stay ahead of the deadline, and every day you don’t produce is one day you get closer to falling behind your deadline.
So let’s say it takes me two to three days to write two weeks’ worth of dailies. It takes me a day to pencil two weeks, a day to ink two weeks, and Nathalie a day to zip it and get it on a courier,tracing vellum over top. I really like that ink for the vellum surface. The white-out I use is animation paint. I think it’s called Cartoon Color. I love the texture of it, I love the way it dries. I find it’s better than any other white-out product. You can draw over it with pencil or pen, and it’s just like you’re working on paper again. It’s a beautiful tool.
Tom Heintjes: Do you use a Rapidograph for straight lines?
Lynn Johnston: Yes, I do. I wish I could draw like Pat Brady or Bill Watterson. Things like furniture, the way they use those wonderful freehand lines, but I cannot do it. I also cannot draw circles or ovals very well, and I use templates for those. I curse myself every time I try to draw a freehand circle or straight line. I just screw up every time! I wish I could draw things as fluidly as I draw beings.
Tom Heintjes: Whose work do you currently enjoy?
Lynn Johnston: One of the problems is that I don’t see everything. I don’t get all the editorial cartoonists, and I don’t get all the dailies. Of the ones I see on a regular basis and really read and enjoy, I would put Rose Is Rose at the top of the list. I admire Cathy Guisewite’s writing ability. I read the work very closely for her innovative punchline ability. I read Cathy as much as a technical guideline as for anything else. She gets into some things—weight, clothing—that some people may find repetitive, but I find she has a skill for writing that not many other people have. I still think that Calvin & Hobbes is one of the best-drawn strips there is. I’m interested to see how Bill Watterson is going to develop in the future as a writer. It will be interesting to see where Calvin & Hobbes goes from here. That’s what I’m looking for. I’m also enjoying Jumpstart by Robb Armstrong. I think that’s exciting. I know Robb and his wife just had a baby, so I’m reading it to see when a baby is going to creep into the strip. And knowing the cartoonists is part of loving their work. Charles Schulz is probably my dearest friend in the industry and it’s such a thrill to say so. When I’m down I call him, and he calls me. We send books back and forth, and when he’s mad about something he’ll call me. And I just adore that connection. I know all about the red-haired girl, and I know his wife very well. I know that his poor little dog is blind and deaf now. I see things happening in the strip that I know personally about him. There’s a connection there that’s sort of a spiritual bond. Losing his work from the paper and losing him personally . . . it would be such a blow. It would be very tough for me to recover from that. There are very few things that reduce me to tears at the drop of a hat, but thinking about that does.
Tom Heintjes: How do you feel when you look at your early work?
Lynn Johnston: Oh, I’m embarrassed by it, of course. [laughter] But that’s good, because if you’re not always improving, you might as well quit. I am forever getting sent stuff by young guys and women asking for a critique. And to the ones who get outraged by an honest critique, I want to say, “Hang up your pen, Jack, because you’re never going to go anywhere, because you’re not insecure enough to improve.” The ones who say, “That really hurt, but I’m going to try,” those are the ones who give you hope, because you have to look at everything you do and say, “I can do better than that.”
Tom Heintjes: Do you have any words of advice for aspiring cartoonists?
Lynn Johnston: You have to be brutally honest with yourself if you want to be in the world of strip cartoons or editorial cartoons, because you have to be so many people wrapped up into one. You have to be a writer, a humorist, an artist and an actor. You have to be a superb actor, because you have to breathe life into all these characters. If one of your characters is laughing, you want that mouth wide open and the tongue out, eyes crinkled up, and you want to convey that expression so that it goes into the eyeball of the reader and straight to the brain. You have to be able to act that well. If your mom says you’re doing fine and the guy down the block laughs at your stuff, that isn’t enough. It has to compete with the stuff out there now, and the ability of so many people only goes so far. And they try. And they try. And they try. And they send you stuff again and again. And you want to say, “But you’re not listening. You’re not getting any better. You’re not standing back from it from an objective point of view and saying to yourself, ‘It’s not funny enough’.” How do you say to somebody, “You draw well, you’re witty, you’re a swell guy, but you’re not funny enough!”? It’s awful hearing that from somebody in the business, but you’ve got to say it to yourself. And how do you get funny enough? You get funny by watching and studying people like Bill Cosby, who say funny things, make funny faces and use funny body language. You don’t look at successful cartoonists’ work and say, “Gee, why are they there and I’m not?” You look at their work and say, “They’re there and I’m not because the line does this and the words do that.”
You also have to involve the audience in the gag. You can’t hand them a gag. You have to let them get the gag. Here’s a very bad example—two nuns are sitting on a bus and one of them is doing a crossword puzzle. One of them says, “Sister, what’s a four-letter word ending in ‘it’ that you find in the bottom of a bird cage?” The other replies, “Grit.” “Oh,” says the first nun. “Do you have an eraser?” The audience has to “think” to get the joke. Why does she need an eraser? The answer to what she wrote, obviously, is “shit,” but it’s never spelled out. The audience laughs because the audience is involved. So many people don’t do that—they want you to get the gag so badly that they hand it to you. Even a five-year-old wouldn’t think it was funny, because he’d see the gag coming before he got to the punchline.
You have to be able to write poetry, because the way you write a strip is with an economy of words, a flow and a choice of words, that the reader reads straight through. There’s no stopping and starting. And you’re drawing for the reader. You’re not drawing for you. So many cartoonists are so selfish and are enjoying their work so much that they don’t realize it’s a performance for an audience. If you don’t connect the forehead to the nose, for example, and those eyes are forever floating, and the hair is kind of a chicken’s crop up on top . . . you, the artist, can see the character because in your “computer printout” all of that works for you, but the audience might look at it and just see a series of worms. Your gag is lost, because the audience is still looking at the character and saying, “Is that a nose, or is that part of his hair? What am I looking at here?” You’re performing for an audience, and you’ve got to draw for that audience. The characters have to be somebody the audience cares about. When you’re doing a comic strip, people tend to assume the readers will instantly relate to their characters, but that’s not true. It takes three years before Joe Blow the reader will say, “That character will always respond in this way.” Over time people realized that Dagwood would always miss the bus. A new creator might do a strip about a farmer and his talking animal and have all kinds of gags about it. Meanwhile, the readers are saying, “Why does this animal talk? Is this guy married? Why is this happening?” And they can’t relate, because the cartoonist never gives the readers enough information, and for three years, every single day, you have to say, “Hi, my name is Jack and I have a talking moose.” Every single day. And three years later, people are going to say, “Hey, did you read the strip about Jack and his talking moose?” People assume that because they know their characters intimately, their readers will. But the readers are skeptical. They want what they’re used to. They don’t want Rex Morgan, M.D. to go away. “I don’t want to lose M*A*S*H! Don’t give me a replacement for M*A*S*H—I’m going to hate it!” To buck that attitude, you’ve got to be so appealing, so understandable, that the reader’s going to say, “Well, that one’s intriguing. I’ll read it again tomorrow.” And if they read it tomorrow, they have to find it equally intriguing. Often, new creators are so comfortable with their own stuff that they don’t realize they have to spoon-feed the audience. It’s one statement a day. In a sitcom, for example, you can have a full understanding of the characters in a half-hour, but in a comic strip, you’ve got to hook the reader a little bit, day by day. It’s like fishing—you’ve got to use the right hook and the right bait, and you wait, wait, wait, wait.
Tom Heintjes: And it’s that patience that eventually leads to the readers’ identification with the characters.
Lynn Johnston: That’s exactly right. And once your readers identify with your characters, you know they’re going to look forward to seeing them every day, and that’s the rewarding part—knowing that your characters are a part of your readers’ lives, even if it’s only for a few moments each day.