Animation is not an easy medium, but it certainly has come a long way in the years since Lynn Johnston started For Better or Worse.
“I got into animation in the 1960s, when it was done the old-fashioned way, all drawn by hand,” says Johnston.
“I was living in northern Manitoba where there were really no amenities up there. We would get our paper a day late and we had one television station. I would fax my original pencil drawings to my editor and then he would help me edit everything over the phone and then I would draw everything up on Strathmore paper and send the hard copy all the way to Kansas City.
"Everything had to be done about six weeks ahead of time for the daily comics and eight weeks ahead of the deadline for the Sunday comics because those ones had to be sent to Buffalo for colouring, which was another big process. They had really only discovered how to colour electronically and my comics were one of the first to go through that process.”
From Manitoba to Buffalo to Kansas City and then circulated back around Canada seems like an extraordinary amount of time and travel compared to how the business operates today, and Johnston says it was a process she looks back on with admiration.
“That was just how you did it, you learned how to do the process and you just do it and you’re grateful for what’s there.”
Johnston realized she had an aptitude for cartooning at an early age.
“You’re in grade five and you’re drawing caricatures of your teachers and your friends are wanting to use them to turn them into dartboards, which gets you in trouble, but you don’t realize that you are unique. It doesn’t occur for quite a while that you might have a skill that is unique to you, so if that’s going to carry you through and make a living for you then that’s great. Often it doesn’t,” she says.
Johnston says she was lucky that she was good enough to find a way to make her artwork earn her a living.
“It’s really just a practice, and that requires looking at other people’s work. I was addicted to Mad Magazine and the New Yorker Magazine; I mean I couldn’t have a better teaching guide than those because of all the different styles of comic art in there. For a while, you can copy but eventually, you create your own style, otherwise, you’re just a tribute band. You can take lessons to learn how to use a medium but mostly it's practice and talent. You do have to have the talent, and a lot of people that do have the talent don’t realize it. Not everybody can do this,” says Johnston.
Best known for the comic strip For Better or Worse which was based on her own family, Johnston says it wasn’t an overnight sensation that led her to become one of Canada’s most recognized and celebrated cartoonists.
“You do a lot of work for free and eventually if people like what you’re doing they will give you a leg up if you’re lucky. I did a lot of work for free initially, but I first started working in Hamilton full time as a medical artist for McMaster University. I did a lot of wedding invitations and posters and greeting cards and gags for the local paper. A lot of stuff to really test out my own ability,” she says.
“I trained as an animator in Vancouver and so I was able to put a lot of those skills to work at McMaster and because they knew I was a cartoonist, they asked me to do a lot of comic art for the medical school because students would remember a cartoon much more effectively than they would remember slides, and graphs and charts. I did a little book on pregnancy and that turned into three books altogether and they were published in Minneapolis.”
From there the books got sent to the Universal Print Syndicate in Kansas City and they offered Johnston a 20-year contract which Johnston says was both thrilling and terrifying at the same time.
“It is one thing to do a gag every so often for the local paper, but to do something every single day of the year for the next 20-years, that was daunting,” she says.
“I asked for a six-month creative contract so that I could learn how to do this thing and I worked closely with an editor who was very helpful. But I was not as joyful about it until I had done it for about two or three years, that’s when I felt a lot more confident.”
Johnston says aside from the ability to create and draw a comic, another talent that helped her along the way was in recognizing what stories have been done and making your own material.
“There’s an art in the ability to be able to hang on to an awful lot of material. There’s a strange thing that allows you to remember when you’re trying to storyboard ideas that you will not only know if you have done it before but also if you’re swiping from someone else. If you’re a musician or a lyricist, you’ve likely heard so much music in the past and yet you’re always careful not to create something that’s not like somebody else’s and get labelled a plagiarist,” she says.
“You want to create something that is uniquely yours. You can plagiarize yourself if you’re not careful really. Old chestnut gags like “mom gets breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day, but it becomes a mess, but she’s so happy anyway because the kids were being so thoughtful,” well every cartoonist has done that gag. It's fine if you do that gag, as long as you do it differently than anybody else has done it.”
Before the Hallmark Christmas movies gave the North Bay downtown area a recognizable status in pop culture, it was Johnston’s comic strip that emulated Main Street.
“I spent 40 years of my life in North Bay and a great deal of For Better or Worse was about North Bay and one of the wonderful things about living in a small town when you’re writing stories is that everything is accessible. If you want to know about the police department, you probably know a police officer. If you want to know about the local helicopter school, well you could go there. If you want to talk to somebody who owns a bookstore, well there was Gullivers Books, and Susan and I would spend hours together. Everything is accessible and a great deal of the illustrations were based on the downtown of North Bay and some of the characters and the names of the characters were based on North Bay,” says Johnston.
“I was grateful to have lived there. The people are friendly. They watch you put out your garbage and they see the hassles you get into and your ego is really in check and people are caring and supportive and give you your privacy and I was very grateful for that, I think that saved my bacon. But also, it is just a great place to live and North Bay has got so much to offer.”
For Better or Worse originally ran from 1979 to 2008 and over that time the accolades for Johnston poured in; the first woman to receive a Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year by the National Cartoonists Society in 1985, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, a Star on Canada’s Walk of Fame and an Order of Canada recipient.
“It’s wonderful and life-affirming, it’s something that you don’t take for granted,” says Johnston on receiving the Order of Canada.
“They bring all the recipients to an atrium before the ceremony and stand you in line in alphabetical order and everybody was looking at everyone else asking “why are you here?” and these were scientists and people who had saved lives through amazing rescue operations and people who had created new vaccines. The people in that room were beyond belief, and I was just a cartoonist for heavens sakes. The level of modesty was overwhelming, and it was wonderful,” says Johnston.
“I don’t think you can do this kind of thing if you are super arrogant. Arrogant people don’t learn anything new and creativity is all about learning something new and knowing you can do better tomorrow than you did today.”
