It’s all too real, the experiences of the Patterson family, which so many readers from around the world followed over the course of thirty years. The acclaimed works of Canadian cartoonist, Lynn Johnston, For Better or For Worse, gave readers a family to grow with, laugh with, cry with, and share with every day.
“It’s been fun; it’s been great,” Johnston said, reflecting on her career—and the lives of her beloved characters. “I’ve done what I loved.”
For her, the journey began young, in a televisionless house, with a vaudevillian father and an artistic mother.
“He could dance and sing and play instruments and his stage presence was always there even if he was just dad, so he was always telling jokes and whatnot and my mother was a fine artist so this combination of interests was always there,” she said, noting how it was about being entertaining and drawing for her. “I didn’t know from the beginning that I would make a living as an artist.”
Johnston said artists should not be dissuaded by the early stages of their artistic development because everybody starts somewhere.
“Everybody does stuff that they don’t want other people to see, because of how silly they might think it is,” she said, motioning to some of her much older drawings on display at the WKP Kennedy Gallery—which is currently hosting the For Better or For Worse: The Comic Art of Lynn Johnston Exhibition.
For Better or For Worse: The Comic Art of Lynn Johnston looks at the career of popular comic artist Lynn Johnston. The exhibition explores influences on her early work and the way her drawing style changes over time in the popular comic strip For Better or For Worse.
“I wanted to be able to show people the stuff I did when I was really young, especially the students because young people are so interested in comic art and the fantasy of graphic novels,” she said. “Who doesn’t love cartoons and comic books? When they are young, they like to draw their favourite cartoons and characters and get consumed and I was too.”
During her career, Johnston said there was an immense pressure to keep up the quality of her work on a day-to-day basis, with thousands of readers expecting a good laugh while following the lives of the Pattersons.
“When you’re into something that’s so broad, you’re more terrified of keeping that little piece of real-estate going every single day,” she said, referencing the spot her comics would get in over 2,000 papers across Canada, the US, and over a dozen other countries. “It’s like running a marathon. Okay, I made it to that first post, now I can make it to that river and make it over that bridge, but it’s terrifying. You have to work hard to keep that space, you have to be good enough.”
However, she knew she was doing something right for her readers with the ensuing popularity of the comic.
Despite the relative comedic nature of her work, Johnston said it couldn’t be all the same.
“You can’t be funny every single day,” she said. “If you have a really bad lunch at a really crappy roadside restaurant, aren’t you going to really dig into that wonderful salad and delicious soup at the next one? If you didn’t have that crappy lunch you wouldn’t appreciate the good stuff.”
She said as the characters grew throughout the years, it became important to draw attention to the serious parts of life, like the sad, angry and tragic experiences everybody goes through. Sometimes this meant tackling controversial topics, an aspect Johnston said required her to wait until her career was strong enough to not have to worry about the censorship of some publications and backlash over some topics.
“I had to be strong enough in that industry before I could tackle an important topic, because it’s real, the death of a pet, the coming out of a friend, the almost loss of somebody in a canoes accident, illness, relationships breaking down, if you can’t show that you aren’t showing anything, they’re the meat and potatoes of what life is,” she said.
