Lynn’s Final Letter (at least for now)
Here is the link to the letter. I will comment on the parts I find interesting, which is most of it:
A Letter from Lynn about FBorFW
To all my wonderful readers,
A couple of weeks ago I drew and sent the last two weeks of dailies, bringing to a close the main storyline of FBorFW. It sure wasn't easy! I think the drawings were harder to do than the writing, because I'd been thinking about what to say and how to say it for a long time. I had that "running in a dream" feeling, as though I'd never get there, but once the deed was done, I felt strangely comforted; a feeling that I'd done the right thing at the right time.
This is a discouraging statement to make. This means things like “Gordon Mayes and his 6 limousines” or “Elly and Phil making jokes about Grandpa Jim’s heart attack”were things she had thought about for a long time. If this last month of wedding strips was the culmination of a long period of thought, then it is as clear evidence as you can get about what Lynn Johnston is capable of producing.
For the past 7 years or so I was aware that the stories were becoming more complicated, the drawings more controlled and the characters more realistic. Gone was the loose, funny, free-hand line I had started with. As the adventures of the characters became more defined, so did the drawing, until I researched everything, from forklifts to faces, from aircraft to arcades. I was out for accuracy. Every house, every apartment had a floorplan. The furniture and the color schemes had to be consistent- as did the information I gave about the "players", and if I made an error, you would let me know!
Aside from the “faces”, I agree with this wholeheartedly. Lynn Johnston has done a very good job with keeping a lot of those details straight. I can usually figure out where the action is taking place just from looking at the background or the striping on a chesterfield.
Readers catch the minutest of details and I'm always grateful for a correction or a reminder!! One thing I was often asked was to tell more about folks such as Anthony's parents, but there were so many characters...and only one statement a day (less than 30 seconds) to try and tell a story, I just hoped you would make up your own minds as to how these distant players fit in!! With that said, I have now let all of this pass into the mist as the story ends and I return to the beginning.
Surprisingly, there is no mention of Beth Cruikshank’s 60-page biography on Anthony, especially considering she mentions us making up our own minds about Anthony's parents, which is unnecessary with the biography. As before, "30 seconds" is a poor excuse. She’s been plotting this marriage for over 10 years now, and the simple fact of the matter is she has forgotten she has already shown Anthony Caine’s step-mother 2 times before.
She is in Panel 1, lady kissing Anthony on the cheek at his wedding.
She is in Panel 4, lady on the left sitting on the chesterfield at his baby shower.
For Better or For Worse begins again on September the 1st with new material, new art and new enthusiasm! Without the need to visit all of the auxiliary characters, I can concentrate once again on the insular little Patterson household. I have the children all to myself again. I can do spot gags and silly stuff. I can fix what I don't like about my early work as I add and subtract...redraw and just improve everything.
Given the lead-in paragraph, what she is really saying is: I don’t plan to research anything anymore or try to remember obscure characters.
The crazy part is drawing the way I used to draw!! I practised, using the first two books, copying as if I was trying to draw someone else's work, not my own! It's taken some time to simulate the earlier work, but it's coming and because it's a simpler style with less detail in the background, I can comfortably do all the art myself without the need for another illustrator.
I am not sure why it is necessary to say this, but it is inaccurate. I saw her drawing in the video where she talks about this, and it was not the thick-lined old style she used to have. A better way to phrase it would be she plans to draw the characters the way they used to look, i.e. Elly has a small nose again. Kevin Strang is going to do the colouring and grayscaling for her. For some reason, she does not consider this to be a part of the illustration. Go figure. Jackie Levesque (colours and grayscale) and Laura Piché (background and inking) are gone. Laura in particular, used to post to the Howard Bunt Blog, and I am sad to see her go.
This makes the process faster and because I'll be including some of the classics, I'll be able to take some much needed time off!
Translation. I can do as many new strips as I did last year in less time, and so I get even more time off.
I expected to find a return to my old style of drawing a bit stressful, but it's been easy! I also expected to find it hard to rip into the belief that I was a young mom again with two small kids...but this is really fun!!!
Lynn has always liked these kinds of strips. I have noticed, looking through the old strips that April stayed Aypo for a long time, and after she finally became April, there were quite a few strips with Gordon’s family and his young children, before Meredith came into being. I am not surprised she likes it.
I'm so enjoying the loose style, the freedom to play with the younger Pattersons again and the less complicated cast of characters. Mixing the classic and new strips, is both challenging and rewarding as I improve the work I started with. Who gets to do this???
I think Lynn Johnston is the only one. I also think she should enjoy it while it lasts. As near as I can tell, with the Washington Post dropping the printed strip, there will be many other big papers who will follow suit. When I lived in the Dallas area, there was, for a brief time, a radio station that played all Beatles music. I knew it couldn’t last, and it didn’t, but for a time I enjoyed listening to that station, and all the obscure Beatles music being played. I expect this mixture of old and new for Lynn Johnston will be the same way. Either she will decide that continuing with reprints and keeping her vacation time is worth the loss of income, or she will decide she can no longer tolerate the loss of income and change again. If the past 3 years has been any indication, I would bet on her changing again.
I consider it a real privilege to be able to work on the beginning again and I hope you'll enjoy what I do. One way or another you'll let me know - and I look forward to hearing from you.
September. Will it be for better or for worse? Sorry. Couldn't resist.
A Letter from Lynn about FBorFW
To all my wonderful readers,
A couple of weeks ago I drew and sent the last two weeks of dailies, bringing to a close the main storyline of FBorFW. It sure wasn't easy! I think the drawings were harder to do than the writing, because I'd been thinking about what to say and how to say it for a long time. I had that "running in a dream" feeling, as though I'd never get there, but once the deed was done, I felt strangely comforted; a feeling that I'd done the right thing at the right time.
This is a discouraging statement to make. This means things like “Gordon Mayes and his 6 limousines” or “Elly and Phil making jokes about Grandpa Jim’s heart attack”were things she had thought about for a long time. If this last month of wedding strips was the culmination of a long period of thought, then it is as clear evidence as you can get about what Lynn Johnston is capable of producing.
For the past 7 years or so I was aware that the stories were becoming more complicated, the drawings more controlled and the characters more realistic. Gone was the loose, funny, free-hand line I had started with. As the adventures of the characters became more defined, so did the drawing, until I researched everything, from forklifts to faces, from aircraft to arcades. I was out for accuracy. Every house, every apartment had a floorplan. The furniture and the color schemes had to be consistent- as did the information I gave about the "players", and if I made an error, you would let me know!
Aside from the “faces”, I agree with this wholeheartedly. Lynn Johnston has done a very good job with keeping a lot of those details straight. I can usually figure out where the action is taking place just from looking at the background or the striping on a chesterfield.
Readers catch the minutest of details and I'm always grateful for a correction or a reminder!! One thing I was often asked was to tell more about folks such as Anthony's parents, but there were so many characters...and only one statement a day (less than 30 seconds) to try and tell a story, I just hoped you would make up your own minds as to how these distant players fit in!! With that said, I have now let all of this pass into the mist as the story ends and I return to the beginning.
Surprisingly, there is no mention of Beth Cruikshank’s 60-page biography on Anthony, especially considering she mentions us making up our own minds about Anthony's parents, which is unnecessary with the biography. As before, "30 seconds" is a poor excuse. She’s been plotting this marriage for over 10 years now, and the simple fact of the matter is she has forgotten she has already shown Anthony Caine’s step-mother 2 times before.
She is in Panel 1, lady kissing Anthony on the cheek at his wedding.
She is in Panel 4, lady on the left sitting on the chesterfield at his baby shower.
For Better or For Worse begins again on September the 1st with new material, new art and new enthusiasm! Without the need to visit all of the auxiliary characters, I can concentrate once again on the insular little Patterson household. I have the children all to myself again. I can do spot gags and silly stuff. I can fix what I don't like about my early work as I add and subtract...redraw and just improve everything.
Given the lead-in paragraph, what she is really saying is: I don’t plan to research anything anymore or try to remember obscure characters.
The crazy part is drawing the way I used to draw!! I practised, using the first two books, copying as if I was trying to draw someone else's work, not my own! It's taken some time to simulate the earlier work, but it's coming and because it's a simpler style with less detail in the background, I can comfortably do all the art myself without the need for another illustrator.
I am not sure why it is necessary to say this, but it is inaccurate. I saw her drawing in the video where she talks about this, and it was not the thick-lined old style she used to have. A better way to phrase it would be she plans to draw the characters the way they used to look, i.e. Elly has a small nose again. Kevin Strang is going to do the colouring and grayscaling for her. For some reason, she does not consider this to be a part of the illustration. Go figure. Jackie Levesque (colours and grayscale) and Laura Piché (background and inking) are gone. Laura in particular, used to post to the Howard Bunt Blog, and I am sad to see her go.
This makes the process faster and because I'll be including some of the classics, I'll be able to take some much needed time off!
Translation. I can do as many new strips as I did last year in less time, and so I get even more time off.
I expected to find a return to my old style of drawing a bit stressful, but it's been easy! I also expected to find it hard to rip into the belief that I was a young mom again with two small kids...but this is really fun!!!
Lynn has always liked these kinds of strips. I have noticed, looking through the old strips that April stayed Aypo for a long time, and after she finally became April, there were quite a few strips with Gordon’s family and his young children, before Meredith came into being. I am not surprised she likes it.
I'm so enjoying the loose style, the freedom to play with the younger Pattersons again and the less complicated cast of characters. Mixing the classic and new strips, is both challenging and rewarding as I improve the work I started with. Who gets to do this???
I think Lynn Johnston is the only one. I also think she should enjoy it while it lasts. As near as I can tell, with the Washington Post dropping the printed strip, there will be many other big papers who will follow suit. When I lived in the Dallas area, there was, for a brief time, a radio station that played all Beatles music. I knew it couldn’t last, and it didn’t, but for a time I enjoyed listening to that station, and all the obscure Beatles music being played. I expect this mixture of old and new for Lynn Johnston will be the same way. Either she will decide that continuing with reprints and keeping her vacation time is worth the loss of income, or she will decide she can no longer tolerate the loss of income and change again. If the past 3 years has been any indication, I would bet on her changing again.
I consider it a real privilege to be able to work on the beginning again and I hope you'll enjoy what I do. One way or another you'll let me know - and I look forward to hearing from you.
September. Will it be for better or for worse? Sorry. Couldn't resist.
posted by howard at 2:15 PM
8 Comments:
I also think she should enjoy it while it lasts. As near as I can tell, with the Washington Post dropping the printed strip, there will be many other big papers who will follow suit.
According to cahwyguy, the L.A. Times is considering dropping it. They're giving it a trial run and if the numbers don't look good, it's gone. I'm worried Lynn might not have the chance to change her mind. My gut tells me that by the time she does, the strip will be in too few papers to make a difference.
dreadedcandiru2,
I'm worried Lynn might not have the chance to change her mind. My gut tells me that by the time she does, the strip will be in too few papers to make a difference.
I am not so sure about that. Lynn seems to pay pretty close attention to those numbers, and she made a lot of changes just in the last year in response to things.
I don't know , if both the storyline and art complexity became "too much trouble" for her, why couldn't she at least do what is common practice in many comics - use an anonymous background artist(s) who keeps the location designs, research and realistic background details straight, while she concentrated only on drawing the main characters?
If Lynn claims she was still doing all this research and drawing by herself, what WAS this Laura Piche doing?
And if she's losing it in terms of story details and plot continuity, why couldn't she check her own work, or have someone responsible for doing this? - Oh I see, it would go against her control-freak nature...
I have to admit that I would immensely enjoy seeing Lynn's "new" strip get the smackdown. She's way past her prime and her material is not deserving of the space or money it garners. Especially since her "new" idea is in fact a retread of an old strip that is no longer relate-able or relevant.
I also have to admit that I kind of wish she would continue the strip in its current trainwreck fashion. I want to see April marry Gerald, Francoise marry Robin, Liz's baby Jimmy, John's incredibly slow and painful death from a really horrible illness, etc. Since she has taken to making the timeline change to suit her (she did it with Liz, April, and Francoise), she could easily accomplish these things in the next 5-10 years. It would be awful, but in a totally hilarious way.
I am skeptical about Lynn's ability to return to "young family" humor, if her portrayal of Michael and Dee's family and Francie, is any indication.
These children are unrealistic -- sometimes so advanced as to appear years ahead of their age, and sometimes so infantile that they appear years behind.
Plus, the portrayal of Meredith and Robin is relentlessly negative. It's all screaming, teasing, naughtiness, and parental exhaustion or despair. These stressful things occur in all families, of course, but they are balanced by periods of gentleness, beauty, peace, and tenderness. Not, apparently, for Michael and Dee.
I am myself a parent of a preschooler and an infant, and I would expect to relate to Michael and Dee's family all the time and laugh at our shared experiences. I almost never do.
If Lynn revamps her old strips with her new out-of-touch humor, then I suspect I won't relate to the new version of Elly's young family, either.
On another note... I find Lynn's return to the past disturbing from a creative standpoint. It's like she is returning to the womb because her grown-up strip got too big and scary. It sounds like she's going to immerse herself in nostalgia, return to the past where she is in complete control again (Elly's life dream), back to the tiny world of little Michael, Elizabeth, and Farley.
Instead of moving forward, she's moving backwards, shrinking back into the narrow confines of the past. Come to think of it, this is quite similar to what she did to adult Michael and Elizabeth: she yanked them back from full, independent adulthood into cramped childhood locations and relationships.
Lastly, I also suspect some depressing retconning of the past to conform with the present... John will appear little and when he does he'll be angry, impatient, and fat, etc.
I left this same sentiment over at the Curmudgeon, but some of this letter seems coded: I'll only do the core four, so all of you worriers, don't fret--I won't have any gay guys, or foreigners or natives! Just pure, wonder-bread Millboring!
How can you be sure that the woman in those two strips is Anthony's stepmother? (Or his mother -- Lynn probably did not know that Anthony had a stepmother until Beth made her up a couple of months ago.)
Joshua,
How can you be sure that the woman in those two strips is Anthony's stepmother? (Or his mother -- Lynn probably did not know that Anthony had a stepmother until Beth made her up a couple of months ago.)
Obviously, I can't be sure, because she is never named. However, she has a consistent appearance, she is giving Anthony a motherly kiss, and doesn't look like she belongs in Therese's family. Prior to Beth's biography, I had her pegged as the mother. Regardless of status, she is playing that role.
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