Book review - Conversations with Lynn Johnston

 review by Neale Barnholden

McLaughlin, Jeff (ed.). Conversations with Lynn Johnston. University Press of Mississippi, 2026. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Lynn-Johnston

 Readers of Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse have always located an interest in "the truth behind the work" in Johnston's personal life, as Jeff McLaughlin's volume of sixteen interviews with the cartoonist makes clear. With eight interviews conducted during the run of the strip and eight afterwards, the most consistent throughline is Johnston's account of how readers from her children's friends to strangers around the world interpreted the strip as a version of her own life. In a way that's what the strip was designed to do: at one point John
ston figures her own work as suiting the syndicate's need for a comic strip by a woman that (unlike Cathy Guisewite's Cathy) was about family life. Guisewite, an early mentor, told Johnston to make sure that, unlike Cathy, she didn't end up sharing a name with her character. Nonetheless the strip, arising from Johnston's cartooning about her own life for her OB-GYN and his other patients, retained an authenticity that has led many to read it as a kind of roman a cléf about a specific family in addition to a well-observed strip about families in general. Regarding the fictional Pattersons as the real Johnstons is by far the most common reading of the strip, for good or ill. In a surprisingly revealing interview with Tom Heintjes of Hogan's Alley, Johnston, her parents now deceased, is candid about her mother's history of physical abuse of Johnston and her siblings. This makes it even more interesting that McLaughlin's collected interviews twice mention For Better or For Worse portraying father John spanking his son Michael, based apparently on a real incident. In a 1980 interview John's real analogue expresses his discomfort with it (6), and a 1983 strip showing the same scenario was later redrawn as part of Johnston's revisiting (xvii). It shows the complexity of Johnston's work that this is both profoundly important and true to life, and also that it later came to seem like it didn't belong.

Over the years the main theme of the interviews—that the strip is Johnston's real life—takes on many different aspects. Youngest Patterson child April, the Millennial of the family and the only one born during the strip's run, has no real life analogue. This let Johnston use ideas that would have embarrassed her actual children (119). On the other hand, when her real husband Rod, a dentist and implicit model for fictional father John Patterson, had a marriage-ending affair near the end of the strip's run, Johnston wavered in another way between the character and his model, musing in 2014 that she would "bump off the husband" if she followed the strip into the future, "and I know exactly how to do it" (95). In the event, the last regular FBoFW strip has John and Elly reaffirm their marriage vows, suggesting Johnston's balancing act between fantasy and reality, or the more elusive comedy and drama.

Another source for For Better and For Worse is Johnston's observations of her friends and family. A remarkable phenomenon described at many points is Johnston's sense that she knows her characters as one would know a friend. The epitomal example is her decision to have Michael Patterson's friend Lawrence come out as gay. Angry over homophobic reaction to the murder of her own gay childhood friend, comedian Michael Vadeboncoeur, Johnston decided to write a gay child into her strip in 1993. This plot is described many times in this volume, sometimes delving into Johnston's decision to respond to her calmer hate mail, sometimes focusing on the business of newspapers dropping the strip, sometimes on readers seeing rare representation of their own or their child's experience. In the context of the strip, it always shows Johnston's admirable if depressingly timeless commitment to showing the reality of life. Significantly, the storyline isn't ultimately wish fulfillment or grim drama.

In one revealing incident bringing together authenticity, comic strips, and Johnston's own life, Johnston recalls reading comic strips as a child on her grandfather's lap, and reacting against his criticism of Charles Schulz' writing of child characters dialogue. To his remark that "no child has these thoughts", Johnston recalls thinking "We may not have the same words, but we have the same thoughts and the same feelings." Schulz later became a friend of Johnston's, but his approach to realism stayed psychological, and early  in her own strip Johnston made the key decision to age the characters in real time, parting ways from the majority of family strips. This moment is also discussed frequently, but for what must be one of the most consequential artistic choices of Johnston's life, it goes strangely unexamined. The reader is left with the impression that Johnston did it primarily to keep a flow of inspiration from her own growing children (fixed at several years older than the fictional ones). Another famous incident (as a child, I owned the book memorial) shows a stark divergence with Schulz' style, as family dog Farley dies heroically saving April from drowning. Schulz was deeply upset at the idea, first threatening to send Snoopy to the hospital on the same week so that nobody would pay attention to Johnston's work, then raving to Johnston about how "stupid" the little girl was to play on the creek. We might think of Schulz as the hallmark of a new age of comics' psychological realism—and the recent 50th anniversary of Peanuts certainly suggests this in its interest in Schulz' own private life—but Johnston's mix of life's good and bad is very different. Johnston's people grow up, and with that, can die.

Different interviewers seem to approach Johnston in her different facets, and reveal different responses. It's to McLaughlin's credit that he found interviews taking Johnston in somewhat different ways. She positions her strip as a feminist deconstruction of family strips written by working husbands (217)—think of the number of classic strip gags about men coming home from work, vs the number about cleaning up the house. In another sense her significance is the ongoing drama of the characters and the realism that flows from that. Still again, to some her Canadianness is important, and Johnston describes an early editor warning her to never use Canadianisms (254), thankfully overruled by other (American) editors.

This reminded me of the curious conversation at the beginning of American author Rainbow Rowell's 2011 novel Attachments, where two newspaper employees debate whether For Better or For Worse takes place in Canada. They locate part of the pleasure of the strip in the apparent riddle of whether today's installment will finally feature a bag of milk or a chesterfield. In reality the question seems quite obvious as Johnston's inspiration is exclusively from her time in North Vancouver, Lynn Lake, Hamilton, and other Canadian locations. Only the volume's Canadian editor Jeff McLaughlin, in an excellent capstone to the volume, asks about the strips' portrayal of Indigenous characters in a prolonged storyline set in a northern Manitoba community, receiving an answer that interestingly inverts the logic of Lawrence's homosexuality, in that Johnston did it to share a culture she expected her readers to know nothing about. Johnston's belief that settler Canadians are appalling unaware of indigenous culture and communities is rooted in her own experience and seemingly proven by this being the sole mention of the storyline.

McLaughlin's foreword notes that few interviews from during the strip's run were substantial, and also remarks that they were very repetitively focused on the same storylines (Lawrence coming out and Farley dying evidently); as a result the bulk of the book is retrospective. Johnston, however, is a complicated figure for temporality, having ended her strip with a years-long revision of her earlier work, to an extent that reminded me of Hergé's wholesale redraws of his work (with at least one motive for Johnston being the same as Hergé, the evolution of her drawing style). As with the best of the Conversations volumes, the interest for scholars is both the authorial voice and the intriguing threads to pull on. For my part, having recently read many Peanuts retrospectives, I was struck by the fact that Johnston, like Schulz, suffered from a neurological condition giving her a hand tremor—this despite the fact that unlike Schulz her art grew noticeable finer and more detailed over the years. Where Schulz' tremor has received some scholarly attention, I'm unaware of any medical interest in Johnston's work. And on the same lines, Johnston's career turn from medical illustration to cartooning is an interesting juxtaposition—and reminded me that Fred Kelly, a Canadian comics great of a different generation, made the exact opposite switch. While this volume would be fascinating and useful to fans of the strip, it is also an invaluable resource for scholars looking at what is indisputably one of the most important Canadian comics ever.

As a last note, it's made clear in this volume that Johnston was one of the last cartoonists to work with a two-decade long syndication contract, which enabled her work to sprawl for years and reach a relatively huge audience, even as it forced her to a rigid schedule of production and made her answerable to editors. A standout roundtable with Raina Telgemeier and Kate Beaton suggests a link between Johnston's work and the later prominence of memoirs in the graphic novel form. For Better or For Worse is perhaps the only daily newspaper strip to be so clearly recognizable as an ancestor of the form. I wouldn't suggest McLaughlin's selected interviews "reveal" For Better or For Worse as the memoir so many readers took it as, but I think some incidents make it clear that it was dedicated to a realism that approached memoir. For her part, as this book amply shows, Johnston has spent a career both acknowledging the authenticity of her strip, as well as disclaiming any one-to-one relationship between the Pattersons and her own family—and in a later interview, is magnanimous and generous to her the memory of her abusive mother. This book is a testament to the complexity of Johnston's work, a complexity connected directly to her conviction that gay children and overworked mothers (and dead dogs, and goofy sound effects) simply exist and are a part of life, which sadly continues to be a lesson worth teaching. "It's just stuff," Johnston remarks, introducing what seems like an alternate title to her strip: "Stuff that happens to everybody" (68).