The Lynn Johnston Interview [excerpt]
conducted by Tom Heintjes

The award-winning creator of For Better Or For Worse discusses the challenging path to her present success

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: 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: 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.

Lynn Johnston: 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.

Lynn Johnston: I think there are lots of women cartoonists. I think they're working at ad agencies, and other people are getting credit for their brilliance. They are animators, they do cards, they are everywhere, wonderful, talented women cartoonists. But very few have come into this comics field, for whatever reason.

I never thought that I could do this. I never applied for this job. I never sent anything in and said, "Hey, check this out, give me a job." When I signed a contract at Universal Press Syndicate, the people around that big rosewood table were interested in celebrating. They wanted to take me out to lunch, but I went back to the hotel and -- swear to God -- got physically ill.

Tom Heintjes: You realized what you'd gotten yourself into.

Lynn Johnston: How could I produce material every day, 365 days a year? How could I do that? I could see producing a book now and then, but a daily comic strip? I was going to have readers every day who would expect a certain level of quality work, and I think that maybe that's why I segued into the little vignettes that have moralistic and motherly values, like little parables. I might not be able to have a joke every day, but I could have a thought every day.

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?"

Johnston: 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: 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.

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. 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. 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.

This has been an excerpt of a much longer feature in HOGAN'S ALLEY #1.

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