For Better

Today marks a rebirth of Lynn Johnston's daily comic strip For Better or For Worse. Having built up a large cast of characters spread out over many households, Johnston returns to the nuclear family she started with. According to a February story in the Chicago Tribune, downloadable from the strip's website, the comic will now consist of old strips about the Pattersons, in some cases redrawn to replace lost originals or to update the material.

On her website, Johnston wrote about the challenge of learning how to draw in her earlier, looser style.

I practised, using the first two books, copying as if I was trying to draw someone else's work, not my own! It's taken some time to simulate the earlier work, but it's coming and because it's a simpler style with less detail in the background, I can comfortably do all the art myself without the need for another illustrator.

Johnston had been using assistants to draw backgrounds while she concentrated on the stories, the figures, and especially the faces.

We've seen comic strips with characters that age (Gasoline Alley), and we've seen syndicates rerun strips because their creators are on vacation (Doonesbury) or dead (Peanuts). But Lucy Shelton Caswell of the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State says Johnston's plan is unprecedented. Currently For Better or For Worse is one of the most successful strips in North America, appearing in about 2,000 newspapers. Will it remain popular with readers, many of whom won't remember the material from 25+ years ago?

In a less commercial dimension, will fans be satisfied? Last week showed Elizabeth's marriage, and Sunday's strip described the outlines of the main characters' futures: April goes through college and becomes a veterinarian in the West, for instance, and grandpa Jim lives long enough to see Elizabeth's first child. But is that enough? Will readers turn to fanfiction to fill in the gaps?

Though I'm disappointed not to see more of the family's lives, I'm pleased the strip will continue in some form, not only because I've called Johnston "the greatest Canadian storyteller of our time," but also because I was so startled by her news about her marriage a year ago. Rerunning and revising strips looks like a way for Johnston to ease into a happy retirement that she deserves.

For Worse

In June I wrote about my pleasure in Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse comic strip. I was therefore saddened and dismayed when I went to the strip's website last night to find out why it seemed to be in reruns, and discovered two pieces of big news about the artist.

If I read Johnston's plans correctly, she'll continue to draw some new strips, particularly on Sundays and when she has ideas she wants to share. But the characters will no longer age--one of the elements of the strip that made it so rich.

The Great Canadian Graphic Novel

My comments yesterday about the minority of comic strips that have their characters age reminded me that for months I've been meaning to declare that the greatest Canadian storyteller of our time is not Margaret Atwood, nor Rohinton Mistry, Douglas Coupland, Farley Mowat, and other talented writers.

It's Lynn Johnston, creator of the comic strip For Better or For Worse.

For the first three years or so of the strip, Johnston's characters didn't age--a phenomenon most apparent in the kids, of course. Since then, however, everyone's grown older in "real time," and the storylines have expanded along with them.

The fact that the saga is being created in "real time" with daily reader feedback means that Johnston can both set up developments years in advance and change course or pursue new ideas as she goes along. That creates a new kind of storytelling, even apart from the graphic dimension.

Reader interaction has become even more public since the strip began because of the internet. Johnston and her staff maintain an extensive website that offers "Q & Eh" [it is Canadian, after all] and discussion boards. Elly's blog is the current site for reader feedback. Current issue: Does the character of Shannon have any function besides enlightening April and her classmates about people with disabilities?

Web-only features even offer information not found within the panels of the strip, as well as helping occasional readers catch up, as in monthly letters from characters like Michael and Elizabeth.

The site also includes, for fans of all ages, a step-by-step guide to how Johnston and her staff create each strip. It contains such insights as, "For Lynn, it's important to begin inking her character illustrations with the eyeballs."

And for Oz and Ends's Divided by a Common Language feature, I quote from the short section on "Canadianisms":

Bags of Milk: OK, it only appeared once, but this also confused even most of Canada! In Ontario and in some parts of other provinces, you can buy your milk in convenient plastic bags that slip into a jug. You snip off one corner of the bag and voila, you go with the flow! In one strip, Farley punctures a milk bag, streaming milk all over. We received many letters asking: "what the heck was that all about?"

I seem to recall hitting the same problem reediting Toronto-published children's books for the US market years ago. Bags of milk? Is that proper talk for a children's book, or a daily newspaper?