Life takes a bittersweet turn for 'Better' creator Johnston

By PAM BECKER
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

last updated: October 23, 2007 02:49:57 AM

In early September, fans of the comic strip "For Better or For Worse" began to notice that some of the strips departed in style from their usual appearance and seemed situated in another time. Newspapers around the country have been fielding questions from confused readers.

Indeed, creator Lynn Johnston had launched her plan -- unusual in the comic-strip world -- to create a "hybrid" strip in which the present-day story would be minimal and strips from the past would be reprinted as flashbacks.

Her goal was to wrap up her characters' present-day plots by the beginning of September, she told the Chicago Tribune in January. After that, "we can probably choreograph a year's worth of work in a few days," she said then. This schedule would allow her to pursue some retirement plans, including spending more time with her husband of 32 years, a retired dentist, she said.

But two things happened to alter that scenario: She found it difficult to quickly resolve the myriad threads of her characters' lives -- and her husband left her.

"He fell in love with somebody else," Johnston said in a phone interview from her home in the Canadian city of Corbeil, Ontario. "It had been over a long period of time. I just --" she paused, then continued, "well, it's a surprise."

Fans long have known that Johnston's strip is partially autobiographical. The strip's patriarch, dentist John Patterson, is loosely based on Johnston's husband, Rod Johnston. And wife and mother Elly Patterson is considered Lynn Johnston's alter ego.

Asked if the turn in her personal life has changed her feelings toward the characters or her plans for the present-day plot, Johnston answered obliquely. "I've always kept my real private life private because it's not that interesting," she said. "You can have a lot more fun with imagination than you can with real life."

Yet Johnston has been known to use anecdotes from her own life -- or those of friends and family -- as inspiration for the strip. "Everything that I do in the strip is something that, if I haven't personally experienced it, I know somebody who has, and I work with them," she told the Tribune in a 2004 interview while in Chicago on a book tour.

And readers who saw her strip in Sunday's paper, in which Elly dreams that John leaves her for another woman, might think Johnston's recent separation is reflected there. In a poignantly ironic way, the strip is autobiographical, but the events depicted there happened a long time ago. "I drew that strip years ago ... the first year that the strip came out," Johnston said, adding that it is one of the older strips that are running as part of the hybrid plan.

"I really had that dream. ... I put it in a strip, never thinking that it would ever be something that I would experience.

"I've been going over the very first strips that I did, and I decided to let it run. ... I like it; it was good. It's really unique, considering the situation. The girls at (my) studio thought it was appropriate, and we all kind of smiled and said, yes, let's run it."

She conceded that after the separation, "it was hard to draw the John character at first. I thought it would be really, really hard. But fortunately I had a book signing shortly afterward, and people know that I like to do little doodles when I'm signing books. I'll draw one of the characters and then sign my name under it.

"Enough people asked me to draw John that eventually I could just draw the character quite comfortably. The first few were a little hesitant, but the rest came out just fine, and now I'm OK with it."

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