Family affair

Q: In an early interview on the CBC’s The Fifth Estate, you admitted that you were so anxious after you signed your initial 20-year contract with Universal Press Syndicate, that you returned to your hotel room and almost threw up. Well it’s almost three decades [and two contracts] later and you’re on the verge of retiring. How do you feel now?

A: [There’s] a lot of sentiment. I’ve lived with this family for a long time, along with my own — sort of in and out of reality. But I know that it’s time to make the story come full circle, where the children of the original story are adults with children of their own. So, with Michael [Patterson] and Deanna’s [his wife] children being approximately the same age that he and Elizabeth [Michael’s sister] were when the strip began, I thought it was a perfect time to bring the story, not necessarily to an end, but to a story-like conclusion. We’re going to continue with sort of an interesting hybrid.

Q: This “hybrid” strip seems to have caused a lot of confusion among your readers and editors. Many of them assumed you’d be retiring outright in September 2007, which you had stated publicly in several interviews over the past few years. Then in January of this year, you announced an unusual new plan that will see you recycling older strips along with newly drawn panels that “frame” the story. It sounds kind of like a “clip show” on television. Is that essentially how it will look?

A: [It will be] the original strips mixed with some newer strips. There will be some newer Sunday comic content and some new daily content, but whatever I do that is in my new style, the way that I draw now — the characters won’t age or change. So I’m going to keep them constantly the same age.

Nobody’s done [a hybrid strip] before, so it’s an experiment for me as well to see how it’s going to be managed. My drawing style is so different now, I will have to stick with shifting back and forth in time. I was thinking about expanding some of the storylines and drawing the way I used to draw, but I tried and it’s not very easy. So I think we’re going to use the website for quite a bit of that added material, so if people want to know more about other characters or storylines they’ll be able to go to the website.

Q: Often, when a reference is made to Lynn Johnston the cartoonist, it is preceded by the word “female.” Do you consider yourself a pioneering female cartoonist?

A: No. I’m just a cartoonist. I was born to do this. It’s one of those things you can’t escape, it’s just there and you do it — that’s the one thing that works for you. It’s like someone who wants to sing or dance and their parents will say “Why don’t you get a real job?”, but you know this is the thing you have to do.

Q: You’ve been very frank in the past about your difficult childhood, growing up with a tyrannical grandfather and a physically abusive mother, who refused to acknowledge your success, even on her deathbed. Was the creation of the fictional Patterson family, along with its strong family values, a kind of wish fulfilment for you?

A: Well, I think one thing that happens when you have a childhood that is unhappy, like mine was, is you spend a lot of time alone and you make jokes. Many of the other cartoonists had similar experiences. For example, Mike Peters [of Mother Goose & Grimm] stuttered, so he spent a lot of time alone in his room drawing. My mother was very demanding and strong, so I took everything out on an 8x11½-inch sheet of paper. That was my best friend — my piece of paper.

When I became a parent I told myself I am not going to be rearing my children with a wooden spoon and a textbook. I took it one day at a time. And what’s happened is that I have two children who are very healthy adults. So I feel good that after 33 years I can say “Yes—I was good parent.”

Q: Do you think doing the strip made you a better parent?

A: It certainly gave me an opportunity to let off steam. And it was gratifying to see other people write me and say “I feel exactly the same way you do.”

Q: Your controversial 1993 storyline about the coming-out of teenager Lawrence Poirier was ahead of its time, appearing years before the “outing” of such gay celebrities as Ellen Degeneres and Rosie O’Donnell. It even included a reference to the aboriginal idea of “two-spirited” people — which is just gaining a level of acceptance today. What made you do it?

A: Because it was such a good story. For me Lawrence had always been particularly [long pause] I don’t know: gentle, unique, sensitive. It just seemed right — he just always appeared that way to me. Plus, I’ve had a number of friends who were gay, and what made me decide to do this story was that one of them [Michael Boncoeur] was murdered. Michael was a wonderful comedy writer for the CBC, and I had known him since we were in about Grade 8, and when Michael was murdered the authorities in Toronto reacted to it in a very cavalier manner — like “Well, that’s one more of them off the streets.” In the end, the young man who took a knife to him [following a scuffle over his bicycle] was ultimately seen as the victim.

His death really prompted that story, because I wanted people to know that this young man, that you’ve grown up with for so many years, is still the same person. Just because his sexual orientation is suddenly different, he’s still the young man who helped you in the garden, helped carry your groceries and sat with you when you cried at school.

Q: Did you have any idea that the reaction would be so strong? You received death threats at one point.

A: I figured there would be some people who would be angry with me, but I had no idea at the time that it would be such a hot topic. In the end, I think we received well over 3,000 letters, and this was before e-mail. It turned out that 72 per cent of the mail was positive, but the negative ones were so outrageously negative and the people — I mean I don’t think there were more than two people out of the negative letters that you would ever want to speak to in person. They were so ugly.

Q: Family-themed strips are as old as the comics themselves, whether it’s Gasoline Alley, Blondie or even Hi and Lois. Did you read any of these growing up? Were they an inspiration?

A: We lived with the comics growing up — we loved them. My grandfather and my father would analyze them, and my father was quite a good cartoonist but never pursued it. So all my life I remember looking at the comics not as an entertainment, but rather as a piece of art. I loved comic books too, [especially] any one where the female character was believable or strong. I liked Little Dot, Little Lulu, and of course I liked Peanuts, because even though Lucy was kind of a crab, she was strong.

Q: You were very close to Charles Schulz weren’t you?

A: We were really, really close — to the point where we would have a really good scrap. Very few people would argue with him because he was “Charles Schulz,” but I would. There were times when he wouldn’t speak to me, but I was the one he called when he got cancer [in 1999] and I was the one who went and sat next to his bed when he was dying. We had long philosophical talks.

We were rivals as well. When I told him that I was in 2,000 papers, he said “I’ll see you in the Louvre.” He was very competitive — and he was right! He was the only one of us in the Louvre, and I’ll never get there.  

Q: So what happens after the current storyline wraps up? Do you sleep in? Travel around the world?

A: No, no. We’ve got a wonderful team here and a great website, and I think I’m forward thinking enough to know that’s where we’re going more and more — so I want to see where that’s going to take us. I also really want to work more in commercial art and graphic art. We have a wonderful team [a graphic art studio] here [in Corbeil], so we’re doing anything and everything that will excite us whether it’s related to For Better or for Worse or not. Right now we’re designing a wrap-around for a taxi cab.

Q: Traditionally, cartoonists who wanted to retire from the daily grind of newspaper strips had two options: hand their creation over to another cartoonist [what’s called a “legacy strip”] or quit and take the strip down with you, the choice of Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and Gary Larson (The Far Side). Why not follow their lead?

A: Initially that was my plan, and I had sort of speculated on what type of work would fill that space, because that little piece of real estate in the newspaper is a pretty coveted one. Then when Universal Press [her syndicate] said that they felt there was real opportunity to run the older strips, I thought about it and decided that their argument was a good one. Because there were many, many papers that did not pick up the strip in the first 10 years, so in a lot of markets those first 10 years were never seen.

But then there were other editors, like at the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, the Chicago Tribune, who have been wonderful supporters right from Day 1, and I didn’t want to sell those editors the same material without adding something new. So that was my thinking. It would not only give me the satisfaction of still being in touch with the characters, but I would also be providing some new material for the editors and readers.

Q: Do you have any regrets as the strip begins to wind down?

A: No, I don’t think so. I always followed Sparky’s advice — “Do the best you can do, every single day” — and I’ve had a wonderful time. It’s the best life. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But, in my next life, I want to be a man, I want to be a doctor and I want to play the piano.