Female artists gain acclaim as comic strip creators

Cartooning was once a male-dominated profession, but two women who crashed the party with their comic strip ingenuity are Lynn Johnston and Cathy Guisewite. 

They are rock stars within their industry. Each has been selected as the Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year by members of the National Cartoonists Society. 

Johnston won in 1985 for her popular comic strip “For Better or For Worse,” which ran in newspapers from 1979-2008. Cathy Guisewite won the award in 1992. She is the creator of the “Cathy” comic strip that was published from 1976-2010. 

Lynn Ridgway Johnston is slightly older, born in 1947 in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada. This is her story. 

She got her first real job in 1968 as a “medical illustrator” at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “I animated a whole kidney biopsy,” Johnston once bragged. One of the physicians asked her to draw cartoons to illustrate his lectures. 

“The other doctors were infuriated, though,” Johnston said. “They thought it was making fun of their profession, but the students who looked at these cartoons memorized the information 100% quicker than the students who didn’t!” 

When she was pregnant with her first child, her obstetrician asked her for some cartoons to post on the ceiling above his examining tables. 

That led to a book, featuring 80 cartoons, titled “David! We’re Pregnant!” Two more books followed, which attracted the eye of editors at Universal Press Syndicate. They inked Johnston to a deal to produce a four-frame comic strip, beginning in 1979, and then gave her a 20-year contract extension. 

Naming it “For Better or For Worse,” Johnston said was “a good choice, as the strip is not all roses.”

 A signature element of “For Better or For Worse” was that the characters aged in real time. Lead characters Elly and John Patterson matured, their three children grew up, and Farley, the Old English Sheepdog, died. But he went out as a hero, having saved 4-year-old April from drowning in a stream. Thereafter, Farley’s puppy, Edgar, assumed the role of “family dog.”

The Pattersons lived in a Toronto suburb, so Johnston had fun injecting “Canadianisms” from time to time. 

Elly’s breakfasts occasionally included “shreddies” (cereal made of malted, shredded wheat in the shape of little squares) or “beaver tails” (a wheat yeasted pastry that has been stretched to the size of a beaver’s tail and is float cooked in 100% soya oil and then topped with butter and a choice of topping, the most popular being cinnamon sugar). 

Johnston earned her “maple leaf” star on “Canada’s Walk of Fame” in Toronto in 2003, a civic project that now honors 173 Canadian individuals and groups who have made their nation proud.

Celebrating Toronto stardom

Johnston was a dear friend of the late Charles Schulz, creator of the incomparable “Peanuts” comic strip. She said that their connection was “sort of a spiritual bond.” 

For Johnston, comic strip art was the easy part. Writing was harder. Yet, “every day it’s a joy,” she said. 

“There are some days when my work is so covered with ‘white-out’ that I don’t want anyone to see it. And there are days when I can…feel pretty smug.”

 

“There are also days when I feel like I’m going to quit and go work at Woolco. Or it’s gone – I’ve used it all up!” 

No way. America needs more Lynn Johnston “Canadianisms,” such as “bargoons” and “bangers” – bargains and sausages.