Lynn Johnston - For Better or For Worse

For Better or For Worse

In 1978, the Johnstons and their two children relocated to Lynn Lake, Manitoba. She was asked by Universal Press Syndicate if she was interested in doing a comic strip. She sent off twenty copies of a strip called The Johnstons, based on her own family "since we were the only people I knew I could draw over and over again with some consistency." Much to her surprise, the syndicate approved of the initial strips and offered her a twenty-year contract. After a six-month "work-up" period, the strip first appeared in newspapers throughout Canada under the title For Better or For Worse. The strip is currently carried by about 2000 newspapers in Canada, the U.S. and 20 other countries.

Many story lines draw from her family's real-life experiences. Her main characters are named after the middle names of her husband and children. Elly is named after a friend who died when Johnston was young. Her brother-in-law Ralph Johnston inspired the controversial story about Lawrence's coming out. Deanna was based on Aaron's high school sweetheart, who died in a car accident years after their relationship ended. Johnston's niece Stephanie is developmentally handicapped and her experience is shared in recent story lines on the integration of developmentally handicapped students in April's class. Elizabeth's teaching career was based on daughter Kate's decision not to pursue a career in education, but provided Johnston with a chance to imagine how that may have turned out.

The characters in For Better of For Worse have aged in "real time". On August 31, 2008, Johnston herself appeared in the Sunday strip, which was supposed to be the end of the cartoon, and announced that she would take the story back nearly 30 years to soon after its beginning, with half of the material to be new and the other half repeats. The "new" material was actually reworked versions of older strips with retouched artwork and new dialogue that was sometimes only tweaked to use modern expressions or product names in place of older ones. As of July 12, 2010, this practice was abandoned, and the syndicated strip now consists strictly of straight reprints of Johnston's early 1980s-era work.