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It's 'New-Runs' For The Better

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The Washington Post

Published: August 31, 2008

Cartoonist Lynn Johnston can't bring herself to abandon her fictional family. For years, the "For Better or for Worse" creator mulled retirement, then lightened her workload by creating flashbacks and repurposing the archives of her popular comic. Finally, she knew she needed to conclude the Patterson family's 29-year saga.

Today's cartoon is an adieu of sorts to readers, but not a final farewell. She announced this month that she would retell her strip's narrative, beginning Monday, by taking her continually aging characters back to 1979, but creating new artwork and some dialogue. Her syndicate says it's the first time a mainstream cartoonist has set out to tell the same story twice.

What the reflective Johnston, 60, realized was that after decades of her identity and creativity and livelihood being linked to a comic strip, she isn't ready to give it up.

"It's in your blood - it's part of your life. I don't want to quit being a cartoonist," Johnston says by phone from her Toronto studio. "It's tough to put it down - you still think of gags. And at the same time, I knew I'd be looking at material that I'd want to improve."

She will keep scrawling dialogue onto a pad, keep inking her fluid lines, keep living in the intricate world of her characters. But this is not life as she would have drawn it up.

"I thought I would now be a retired woman with my Tilley hat and sitting on a cruise ship and going to the Galapagos," Johnston says. But that was before the recent dissolution of her 32-year marriage to the man many readers chose to see as John Patterson's inspiration and doppelganger.

"I really wanted to be happy as a couple and make everything right, but things became more stressful. ... It made me look again at my career."

What's Old Is New Again

Which is why, today, the strip's fans will read Johnston's heartfelt salute as she comes to the endpoint of her characters' lives. (In the final chapter, for example, the original Patterson kids, Michael and Elizabeth, will forever remain grown and married.)

Which is why, on Monday, the strip will time-travel back to 1979 and do it all over again, but with new drawings, new conversations, new wrinkles. (John and Elly Patterson will return to parenting tykes.)

"It's going back to the beginning when Michael and Elizabeth were very young," Johnston says of the approach, which she is dubbing "new-runs." "I'm going back to do it how it should have been done. ... I'm beginning with all this knowledge, so it's a much more comprehensive beginning. I only have an insular world of characters (from 1979) to work with."

As far as Johnston knows, "new-runs" - in which a strip's continual story line is retold - have never been attempted by a syndicated cartoonist ("Most people die or the strip ends," she says).

"All of September will be brand-new material," Johnston says. "In October, it will be a ratio of 50-50. The color Sunday comics will be all-new material. ... I think it will be 50-50 for the first year, at least."

One question rippling its way through the industry is whether many newspaper editors will pay for "new-runs," especially since the core story lines will remain the same.

"The descriptive 'new-runs' was new to us, but it does hint at the blend of new and old that she'll undertake," says Lee Salem, Universal Press Syndicate's president and editor. "It's quite a gamble on her part and much of this terrain will be new to her, too. Only time will tell if it's effective or not."

Johnston, whose strip is in more than 2,000 papers, has endured losing clients before, such as when a gay character, Lawrence, came out. Is she concerned about losing newspapers this time around?

As a cartoonist, "You know people are always going to drop your strip - that's what editors do," she says.

She Feels Half Her Age

Sounding energized, she characterizes the experiment as a way to create a better, livelier, funnier beginning to the strip. Call it the "Old Adventures of the New Lynn Johnston."

Johnston plays down some elements of her early work, but in the '80s, "For Better or for Worse" soon found a commercial following and critical praise.

She received the cartooning industry's Reuben Award in 1985 for the strip, and nearly a decade later, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

She says she feels 30 years old again while drawing it, and relishes the joy that comes from returning to the comic's roots.

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