A Life That Every Parent--and Pet Owner--Can Relate To

As a child growing up in Vancouver, Canada, Lynn Johnston loved comic books so much her mother made her give them up for Lent one year. And as far back as she can remember, her favorite daily ritual was reading the comic strips in the Vancouver Sun with her father or grandfather.

Her grandfather, who liked to analyze the strips, was outraged at “Peanuts,” because, in his opinion, Charlie Brown and his friends were too intelligent. “No child thinks like that,” he would proclaim.

“Sitting on his lap,” recalled Johnston, “I would think, ‘How wrong you are.’ ”

Johnston’s early taste for realism in the comics laid the groundwork for a career. As the creator of “For Better or for Worse,” a strip about the middle-class Patterson family, she has won reader devotion, critical acclaim and occasional public outcry for her incisive and humorous portrayal of contemporary relationships.

“Most comedy is just one way of talking about something that bothers you,” said Johnston, whose newest collection, “Love Just Screws Everything Up,” highlighting her strips from the past year, has just been published by Andrews & McMeel.

She was speaking by phone from her home--”a rural neighborhood with a railway crossing and a corner store”--near North Bay, Ontario, four hours north of Toronto.

Johnston, 49, has been drawing the strip for 17 years, having started with a young family that has developed in the strip in real-time years.

Today, readers of more than 1,700 newspapers follow the everyday routines of the Patterson family, including son Michael, 20, who has just entered university, and daughters Elizabeth, 15, struggling with teenage angst, and April, 5, a kindergartener and the only character who is completely fabricated.

Johnston rejected her original idea of calling the strip “The Johnstons” because it would be unfair to her children, Aaron, now 23, and Katie, 18. The series, she emphasized, is not autobiographical. “You can’t follow your family around, and I wouldn’t violate my children’s privacy. I am an observer and pick up all kinds of things in daily life that belong to other people--it’s like this private Rolodex and when you need information, there it is.”

The Pattersons are currently coping with the realities of middle age, Johnston said. In one strip, Elly is groaning at herself in the mirror as she tries to change her hairdo, then sighs to her husband: “No matter what I do, I still look like a frumpy, middle-aged woman.” As he flees, without comment, she yells after him, “I asked you a question!”

Johnston deals with other subjects not often found in the comics. When Michael’s friend Lawrence revealed he was gay, Johnston got 3,000 letters from readers.

Although most were positive, she said, the negative were “so hurtful” that she has not mentioned homosexuality again, although Lawrence still appears in the strip. “I’m just not ready to take on that angry force again,” she said. “But it was a good story and I am proud of it.”

In another realistic story line, Farley, the aged family sheep dog, died. Readers not only flooded the publisher with letters and tearful phone calls, but even a tombstone engraved with Farley’s face.

“I didn’t want him to die,” Johnston said, “but he was an old dog, and for the strip to stay true to his changing life, I had to let him go.” Based on the reader response to Farley’s death, Andrews & McMeel earlier this year published “Remembering Farley.” Johnston’s 17 books have each sold about 50,000 copies. “Remembering Farley” sold that many in its first six months.

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Although Johnston always knew she would be an artist of some kind, she hadn’t planned on cartooning. She was working as a medical illustrator when a doctor suggested that some comic charts might brighten up his slide presentations. That led to three books of cartoons, starting with “David, We’re Pregnant” (Meadowbrook Press, 1973), a lighthearted look at pregnancy.

“My publisher kept saying I could do these in a comic strip, but I didn’t have that kind of self-confidence, so he sent them to Universal Press Syndicate,” Johnston said.

Universal had just hired Cathy Guisewite, who was doing something new (“Cathy”) from a single woman’s point of view, and wanted a contemporary look at marriage too.

“Family Circus” and “Hi and Lois,” both popular family strips, are written by men. “Even though the guys hit the nail on the head a lot, they just aren’t in the middle of the laundry and the barf. Universal wanted somebody to take the bull by the horns and say, ‘This is how it is.’ ”

Johnston put her irreverence to work. In a typical strip, the family dog and rabbit are shedding, the kids are dropping clothes, the plants are losing leaves and the mother, vacuum in hand, is moaning: “Is there anything alive in this house that doesn’t shed?!”

One critic wrote of the Farley book that, “Not only is it certain to delight pet owners, but the anthology also showcases Johnston’s growth both as an artist and a storyteller.”

“You do get better at stuff, and the sad thing is that once you get really good at something you want to quit,” said Johnston, adding that she is not thinking of quitting yet. “The characters have such intricate lives and have become so realistic, I’ll never run out of material.”