Sunday, November 04, 2007

CBC Observations

The CBC sent its reporter Sandra Abma from CBC North Bay out to interview Lynn Johnston in one video talking about her life and another looser video showing her demonstrating how she draws a strip. Both videos were enjoyable and Lynn Johnston came off very well in them, and not flaky, as she sometimes comes across in interviews.

In the video talking about her life, I was quite surprised to learn that she had created the studio where she and her staff work within walking distance of her house. I realized that when I was hunting down information on Lynn’s former employee Nancy Vincent and found that she used to live on Mac Pherson Drive, the same street as the studio; it is possible that Lynn may not be the only member of her staff to live within walking distance of the studio.

One of the other things I found interesting was a scene where Lynn passes on the art for a For Better or For Worse strip I have never seen before, to Laura Piché, the lady who letters the strip and puts in the background. Laura seemed like a giant compared to Lynn, and I was quite amused to see that neither Lynn nor Laura used those fingerless gloves pictured in the Making of a Comic Strip featured on the For Better or For Worse website.

Thanks to the ability to pause the video, I was able to take a good look at the material Lynn handed off to Laura. Based upon this one strip, it would be incorrect to say that Lynn did completed pencils and inks on the figures of the main characters which is the usual story about her contribution to the art. “Heads and most of the body” would be a better description. She frequently left off hands and feet in the pictured art and only had them lightly pencilled. This confirmed one of my most basic theories about the artwork, which is that Lynn does a light pencilling of those body parts and expects Laura to finish them out.

I wish I could have seen Laura inking them, to see if she inked the hands and feet exactly as Lynn lightly pencilled them, or if she tried to fix them to make them more hand or foot-like before inking them. I have long suspected she inks them just as Lynn has laid them out, without realizing Lynn can’t draw hands or feet well and wants Laura to fix them. I have a friend from high school, who does work for Marvel Comics and he has told me this is a standard practice in sequential art. As he put it, some pencillers will draw a triangle where the hand is supposed to be. It would explain so much about why the characters’ hands are deformed or the feet are shaped like those of a cartoon duck. However, it would not explain to me why Lynn Johnston has not taken the time to make sure Laura understands this. The other possibility is that Laura stinks at drawing hands and feet also.

In the art demonstration video, I actually saw Lynn Johnston use an eraser to correct an error, so I know that she has one. I often suspected she didn’t. On the other hand, I saw her slapping down heads and faces without once taking a look to see if the eyes were placed properly on the head. She also talked about how each character’s room had a specific design, but then she drew the picture without referencing something to show what the character’s room looked like. This explained why there are little subtle differences everytime the rooms reappear from the last time they appear. Lynn is operating from memory and doing a pretty job with that, but not good enough to be exactly right. Everything shown in the video seemed to match up well with the artwork errors we get to see on a daily basis.

We have an artist who cares enough to be consistent, but doesn’t care enough to check her consistency with a given standard other than her own memory. Even when I was a young lad, I knew enough not to trust my memory for things I wanted to be precisely correct. But what does it matter? People are not going to stop reading For Better or For Worse, because rooms don’t look the same.

8 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

I've often suspected that she HAD model sheets and room layouts in her filing cabinets but rarely consulted them. The CBC story confirmed that suspicion, as wel as the notion that she tried, but failed, to be consistent in her artwork.

5:26 AM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

By observing someone's work carefully, you can make pretty good guesses as to how it was actually put together; but rarely do you get such a vivid confirmation of those guesses. There have been moments in the past where I was certain someone else was doing the character art on For Better or For Worse too, but I doubt we will ever get confirmation of that.

7:38 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

Of course we won't. She wants to maintain the illusion that she's the sole artist and author. It's not like she's Jim Davis who openly admits that his contribution to Garfield consists of giving his creative staff a script and signing the end result.

9:22 AM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

That is probably the Charles Schulz legacy operating on Lynn, where he was very proud of having done it all himself. With Lynn Johnston, her imprint is definitely on the strip. If someone else were to take it over completely, I think the differences would be apparent.

12:26 PM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

Not only in the artwork, I should think. If a new artist were involved, he or she would try to tone down some of Lynn's eccentricities as regards character development.

12:58 PM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

Tone down or beef it up. The comic strips these days are filled with characters whose behaviour is so erratic, Elly Patterson's screaming seems docile in comparison. All you have to do is compare Dick Moores' Gasoline Alley to Jim Scancarelli's modern version and see this kind of change being made. Moores' kindly Slim Skinner has been turned in a nutcase imbecile for comic effect, as an example.

2:25 PM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

Which is why Shulz's family made the choice they did by ensuring that nobody could take over after he passed on. They didn't want their beloved father's characters to be subjected to the same sort of adaptation decay that affected GA. That's also why her plan to let someone else take over was a non-starter: she didn't want to see her creations go off-kilter.

3:18 PM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

I was living in Asheville, N.C., at the time Dick Moores was there doing Gasoline Alley, and I remember when he started looking for an artist to apprentice to him to teach him the ropes of the strip and have a confidence it was going to be carried on properly. A friend of mine from high school was an excellent artist and had done some freelance work for Marvel Comics and was asked if he was interested, since he lived in Asheville and he would be more familiar with the lifestyle represented by Asheville which had completely taken over the Frank King style of the strip. My friend wasn't interested, because he preferred comic book art to comic strip art. Eventually, they found Jim Scancarelli to take over the strip, and the first several years after he took over, it was done very much in the style of Dick Moores, clearly because that's the way Moores wanted it. Moores has since passed away and things have changed. Artwise, today it is still very close to Moores' version, but the plots and characterization have become much more Scancarelli.

I think Lynn Johnston would have the same problem, and is astute in realizing she would want to be looking over the shoulder of the person doing the strip, and driving them crazy.

6:03 PM  

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