THUNDER BAY - Cartoonist Lynn Johnston’s ability to tap into the universality of relationships brought a fictional version of her Northern Ontario family into hearts across the continent.
Her strip ‘For Better or For Worse’ began in 1979 when Johnston reimagined herself, her husband and children living in a Manitoban mining town as the wholesome Patterson family from the fictional town of Milborough.
Although the name combined Milton and Scarborough and Johnston envisaged the story taking place in Southern Ontario, the Pattersons could have been any middle class family living anywhere.
“People are the same. It doesn’t matter where you live,” she said.
“What I did was talk about relationships, mostly. You can live anywhere and still have the same emotional response to things. I didn’t use a lot of the things that were normal for us like travelling by float plane, for example and some of the other things we experienced I didn’t cover because most people couldn’t relate to that.”
Johnston found relatable elements of small town living everywhere she looked and that continued when her family moved to North Bay. She found the characters, settings and vocations of resource towns to be as accessible as they were diverse.
The Patterson family gave Johnston a canvass but the soul of their adventures came out of community.
Together, John and Elly tackled the challenges of marriage and parenthood. Once the Michael and Elizabeth characters were old enough to grow their own consciousness, the strip’s focus widened and the content matured along with the characters.
“I like the challenge of doing something that was controversial but there isn’t a person on the planet who hasn’t had to deal with those issues, whether it was family discord or someone is gay in the family,” Johnston said.
“We’ve all gone through that and all the ramifications of dealing with it so I wanted the challenge of dealing with that in a way that was wholesome and comfortable and funny in its own way because in tragedy, there’s always comedy.”
Despite her strip appearing in over 2,000 newspapers for more than three decades, ‘For Better Or For Worse: The Comic Art of Lynn Johnston’ marks the first exhibition of Johnston’s work that has appeared in fine arts galleries. Highlights of the strip including her original comic art are on display, complete with pencil marks and whiteout.
Although Johnston has achieved enough awards and recognitions to cement her place in history, her own definition of success is more personal.
“Success for me was being at the same level as people whose work I admired,” she said.
“Charles Shultz, the folks who did Dennis the Menace, Hi and Lois and Family Circus, these are people I met and stayed in their guest rooms and borrowed their car. They accepted me as an equal. Although I never achieved what Charles Shultz achieved, I got to know him really well and could call him a very good friend. To be accepted by people on a par with them -- for them to say, ‘I really like what you’re doing’ -- that for me was the pinnacle of my career to be accepted by people whose work I’d admired. You can’t get any better than that.”
The exhibit will be displayed at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery until March 6. Johnston will be holding meet and greets on Jan. 21 at 7:30 p.m. and Jan. 22 from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
