Lynn Johnston

After dreaming of being an animator as a young girl, Lynn Johnston had to
reconcile herself to the fact that she’d need to pursue something more
practical. For this reason, she began studying commercial art at the
Vancouver School of Art. After two years, however, Johnston could no longer
cope. The course was behind the times. She wanted to be working in a cutting
edge studio not a stuffy classroom. Thanks to her father, Johnston managed
to secure a job in the ink and paper department at Canada West, a Vancouver
company preparing programming for Hanna Barbara.

Though she was later offered a job in LA’s famed J. Ward studios, her
husband at the time refused to let her take it, moving the family to
Hamilton, Ontario. There, she was forced to take work as a medical artist at
Hamilton General Hospital and McMaster University. The gradual breakdown of
her marriage, however, saw Johnston leave her job and then find herself
alone with a child. With nowhere else to turn, she took a job at Standard
Engravers, an industrial packaging company. Though this position seemed like
a significant step down to her at the time, Johnston now sites it as one
where she learned an immense amount.

One day, Johnston’s obstetrician approached her with an idea. While she had
been pregant several years earlier, she drew up to 80 comic illustrations on
his office ceiling, playfully evoking the wonders and weirdnesses of
childbirth. “Why,” he asked, “don’t we make it into a book?” With the
doctor’s help, Johnston found a publisher and unleashed her first book,
David, We’re Pregant, on a gradually receptive public.

Though she struggled to see a penny from her first two books, Johnston
ultimately found an American publisher who shower her work to the Universal
Press Syndicate, saying “Either you syndicate her, or I will.” Soon
thereafter, Johnston received a letter from UPS asking for twenty sample
comics. The strips she churned out, about a family called a family modelled
on her own, would represent the nascent stages of For Better or For
Worse, one of North America’s most beloved and successful strips.

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