Universal Press Syndicate News Release
Universal Press Syndicate released their news on the end of the modern day For Better or For Worse. I will comment on the items of interest to me.
Kansas City, MO (08/13/2008) Calling the next phase of her comic strips "new-runs," Lynn Johnston announced that beginning Monday, Sept. 1, her immensely popular "For Better or For Worse" will start over again. Using new comic strips drawn in the style she used 29 years ago when the Patterson family first appeared on comic pages, Johnston will begin retelling their story from the beginning, eventually blending at least half of the classic original comic strips with new material.
The change from previous press announcements here is the inclusion of a fraction. Half will be new. Compared to this last year’s hybrid, the reprints were less than half, at least in 2008. The 2007 reprints ran for 3 week seqments, but in 2008 it was more like 2 weeks old and 3 weeks new. Of course part of the new was introducing the modern characters who would then talk about the old material, so it depends on how you think about it. Nevertheless the inclusion of the fraction is no doubt to discourage newspapers from thinking it was going to be a straight chronological reprinting from the beginning with occasional new stuff put it, as it had been pitched before.
Johnston explains her approach and talks about why changes in her personal life led her to back off from earlier plans to retire on a video posted on YouTube.com. Please copy and paste this url in your Web browser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUzkOxgmmc4
This video is interesting because it shows Lynn Johnston at work on a strip, which apparently is little Lizzie trying to walk and bumping her head on a table. It shows Lynn inking in the lettering for the strip, which is a pretty good confirmation that she no longer employs Laura Piché to do that. If Lynn does imitate her old style, which had very few background drawings, and she does her own inking, then that leaves Laura out. Laura wrote to the Howard Bunt Blog at one point, and so I wish her well in whatever she is doing.
“Everything in September is new,” said Johnston, "the punch lines, the drawing, all are new. The only thing retro is the way I'm drawing everything. I want it to flow into the classic material seamlessly.”
This is actually a pretty smart idea marketing-wise, because it will draw people into the old storyline and eliminate any fears that she would be doing straight reprints.
“This first year, the ratio of old to new will be at least 50-50,” explains Johnston. “I want this to be the best thing I’ve ever done, and I’m having so much fun drawing Lizzie as a baby again and revisiting all the characters.”
I love this caveat “this first year” on this statement. Let me rephrase it for you, “This first year, I am going to do enough material, so that you get used to seeing the mix of new and old strips; so that when I switch to doing mostly old strips, you won’t mind.” That’s a reasonable assumption. The problem with jumping back and forth between 1979 and 2008, is that people would get irritated waiting for the modern day plotline to return. With stories set in 1979, Lynn will no longer be faced with a giant cast of characters, where she touches on each of them for a little bit each month. It’s Elly, John, Michael, and Elizabeth all in one place. If she tells a story in that time period, she will probably complete it, so there should not be any waiting through the old material until the new material returns in order to finish a story.
“For a generation of new readers unfamiliar with ‘For Better or For Worse,’ it’s a chance to begin an exciting journey; for current fans, it’s a chance to relive their favorite episodes,” says Lee Salem, president and editor of Universal Press Syndicate, Johnston’s syndicate. One such episode is the adoption of Farley, the Patterson’s beloved dog. That will come in October.
I am pretty sure Farley was a second year character, so if he shows up in October, this clearly shows that Lynn Johnston is no longer pulling only from her first year for reprints.
“At first I thought that I could segue back and forth from today to yesterday, but that became very confusing. Some people really enjoyed it and some just wanted us to get on with the story,” she says.
That is a pretty good assessment of the situation.
Johnston will select material from her collection of almost 10,000 archival strips to help retell the Patterson family's story as her longtime fans remember it, pausing in spots to update references that seem confusing or even to flesh out characters she didn't explore in the first telling.
Clearly then, this is not intended to be a reprinting in chronological order. Hopefully it also means that Lynn will pull out the strips that do not play well in the modern day, i.e. all the “John is a sexist pig” stories.
"I'm starting right at the very beginning—when Elizabeth was a little crawling baby and couldn’t say too much, and Michael was in kindergarten,” she adds.
This does not mesh with the idea that Farley is coming in October, but I understand she is speaking generically. The approximate beginning. However, since we know that she is coming out with a Farley children’s book pretty soon, it makes sense to get him out onto the comic strip so people can have the tie-in. After all, it’s been years since Farley died.
“I’m a better storyteller now, and I want to … improve the storyline or take a piece of art and make it better. What a luxury to change, fix and to augment. I'm such a perfectionist; I want to put my hands on it and have it tweaked here and there.”
The advice I have heard from so many artists is not to do this, as tempting as it may be. You look at your old stuff you did when you didn’t know what you were doing, and you want to fix it. I don’t really think this is Lynn’s motivation. I am sure it were up to her, she would still be doing modern stories and using reprints to take 3-week vacations. She has recognized a large segment of her readership got confused by the back and forth and wrote letters to their newspapers, which irritated them. This way she hopes to keep her readership and keep her vacation time. What she has failed to realize is that there is a whole segment of the population that really gets into the “April was born at the same time as my daughter and I have watched them both grow up” aspect of her story-telling, who may have little interest in going back to watch little Lizzie learn to walk again. I remember some years ago, Marvel Comics tried to run a Captain America continuing series set back in WWII, which eventually failed and was changed back to modern age. They have since done the same but as limited series. There is something about a continuing series where it seems to work better if you don't already know the outcome. It will be interesting to see if newspapers or the readers bail out on the series, because they know the outcome.
Johnston says that a change in her marital status changed her mind about retiring completely.
"At this time in my life I thought I would be on a cruise ship to Panama or the Mediterranean, retired with my Tilley hats, my sneakers. But I’m a single lady now, and I want to keep working,” she says. “Because I don't have to work 365 days of new material into a year, I can still take some time off to paint and travel.”
Yes, we must mention the divorce in all interviews. This is the part I don’t quite understand about this whole thing. Who says she has to have 365 days of material? Gary Trudeau takes vacations and certainly Lynn Johnston, with a top 5 strip, could do the same. My guess is that when Gary Trudeau takes vacations from doing Doonesbury, the syndicate must not be able to charge for his product. My local paper buys another strip to fill in the space during the absence. Instead of doing like Trudeau, Lynn is trying to come up with a way to take vacations and still get money. One of the papers is dropping For Better or For Worse precisely for that reason. This last year, they felt they were being cheated because they got charged for a new strip the same as the reprint. For Lynn to be successful, a lot depends on her audience’s desire to see this new material, even though 50% of it will be old, and as time goes on, even more of it may be old. Otherwise a newspaper may be tempted to say, “I’ll pay for the new stuff and buy a different strip when she does reprints.” If they are not allowed to do that with an “all or nothing” policy, then a lot will depend on the appeal of her new material.
“When I first started the strip, the comic’s style was fast and loose, probably because I was so busy and I had to get it out fast,” she says. “It had a happy freedom to it. What I’m experiencing now by redrawing, it’s almost like I’m drawing portraits. I'm changing John's jaw. And over the years, Elly's nose grew up to the size of a potato. Now, I'm drawing it smaller again, the way it was when I first started to draw. There is a huge difference between the earlier and the later styles.”
This seems odd to me. I wouldn’t describe her old style as fast and loose, but more like young and inexperienced. Many young artists draw things like an artist they admire draws things. Then eventually they will develop their own style, or learn to draw things from models or real life. Young Lynn Johnston’s style was a rip-off of Charles Schulz and her children’s characters were obviously drawn as take-offs of the Peanuts characters Linus for Mike, and young Sally for Elizabeth. Lynn says she is imitating her old style, but from the examples I have seen over the last year and the example she has in the video, all she really means is that she is going to draw John and Elly a little more realistically and less cartoony than they have gotten in their old age. The video strip looked like her same modern style of putting together a strip.
Kansas City, MO (08/13/2008) Calling the next phase of her comic strips "new-runs," Lynn Johnston announced that beginning Monday, Sept. 1, her immensely popular "For Better or For Worse" will start over again. Using new comic strips drawn in the style she used 29 years ago when the Patterson family first appeared on comic pages, Johnston will begin retelling their story from the beginning, eventually blending at least half of the classic original comic strips with new material.
The change from previous press announcements here is the inclusion of a fraction. Half will be new. Compared to this last year’s hybrid, the reprints were less than half, at least in 2008. The 2007 reprints ran for 3 week seqments, but in 2008 it was more like 2 weeks old and 3 weeks new. Of course part of the new was introducing the modern characters who would then talk about the old material, so it depends on how you think about it. Nevertheless the inclusion of the fraction is no doubt to discourage newspapers from thinking it was going to be a straight chronological reprinting from the beginning with occasional new stuff put it, as it had been pitched before.
Johnston explains her approach and talks about why changes in her personal life led her to back off from earlier plans to retire on a video posted on YouTube.com. Please copy and paste this url in your Web browser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUzkOxgmmc4
This video is interesting because it shows Lynn Johnston at work on a strip, which apparently is little Lizzie trying to walk and bumping her head on a table. It shows Lynn inking in the lettering for the strip, which is a pretty good confirmation that she no longer employs Laura Piché to do that. If Lynn does imitate her old style, which had very few background drawings, and she does her own inking, then that leaves Laura out. Laura wrote to the Howard Bunt Blog at one point, and so I wish her well in whatever she is doing.
“Everything in September is new,” said Johnston, "the punch lines, the drawing, all are new. The only thing retro is the way I'm drawing everything. I want it to flow into the classic material seamlessly.”
This is actually a pretty smart idea marketing-wise, because it will draw people into the old storyline and eliminate any fears that she would be doing straight reprints.
“This first year, the ratio of old to new will be at least 50-50,” explains Johnston. “I want this to be the best thing I’ve ever done, and I’m having so much fun drawing Lizzie as a baby again and revisiting all the characters.”
I love this caveat “this first year” on this statement. Let me rephrase it for you, “This first year, I am going to do enough material, so that you get used to seeing the mix of new and old strips; so that when I switch to doing mostly old strips, you won’t mind.” That’s a reasonable assumption. The problem with jumping back and forth between 1979 and 2008, is that people would get irritated waiting for the modern day plotline to return. With stories set in 1979, Lynn will no longer be faced with a giant cast of characters, where she touches on each of them for a little bit each month. It’s Elly, John, Michael, and Elizabeth all in one place. If she tells a story in that time period, she will probably complete it, so there should not be any waiting through the old material until the new material returns in order to finish a story.
“For a generation of new readers unfamiliar with ‘For Better or For Worse,’ it’s a chance to begin an exciting journey; for current fans, it’s a chance to relive their favorite episodes,” says Lee Salem, president and editor of Universal Press Syndicate, Johnston’s syndicate. One such episode is the adoption of Farley, the Patterson’s beloved dog. That will come in October.
I am pretty sure Farley was a second year character, so if he shows up in October, this clearly shows that Lynn Johnston is no longer pulling only from her first year for reprints.
“At first I thought that I could segue back and forth from today to yesterday, but that became very confusing. Some people really enjoyed it and some just wanted us to get on with the story,” she says.
That is a pretty good assessment of the situation.
Johnston will select material from her collection of almost 10,000 archival strips to help retell the Patterson family's story as her longtime fans remember it, pausing in spots to update references that seem confusing or even to flesh out characters she didn't explore in the first telling.
Clearly then, this is not intended to be a reprinting in chronological order. Hopefully it also means that Lynn will pull out the strips that do not play well in the modern day, i.e. all the “John is a sexist pig” stories.
"I'm starting right at the very beginning—when Elizabeth was a little crawling baby and couldn’t say too much, and Michael was in kindergarten,” she adds.
This does not mesh with the idea that Farley is coming in October, but I understand she is speaking generically. The approximate beginning. However, since we know that she is coming out with a Farley children’s book pretty soon, it makes sense to get him out onto the comic strip so people can have the tie-in. After all, it’s been years since Farley died.
“I’m a better storyteller now, and I want to … improve the storyline or take a piece of art and make it better. What a luxury to change, fix and to augment. I'm such a perfectionist; I want to put my hands on it and have it tweaked here and there.”
The advice I have heard from so many artists is not to do this, as tempting as it may be. You look at your old stuff you did when you didn’t know what you were doing, and you want to fix it. I don’t really think this is Lynn’s motivation. I am sure it were up to her, she would still be doing modern stories and using reprints to take 3-week vacations. She has recognized a large segment of her readership got confused by the back and forth and wrote letters to their newspapers, which irritated them. This way she hopes to keep her readership and keep her vacation time. What she has failed to realize is that there is a whole segment of the population that really gets into the “April was born at the same time as my daughter and I have watched them both grow up” aspect of her story-telling, who may have little interest in going back to watch little Lizzie learn to walk again. I remember some years ago, Marvel Comics tried to run a Captain America continuing series set back in WWII, which eventually failed and was changed back to modern age. They have since done the same but as limited series. There is something about a continuing series where it seems to work better if you don't already know the outcome. It will be interesting to see if newspapers or the readers bail out on the series, because they know the outcome.
Johnston says that a change in her marital status changed her mind about retiring completely.
"At this time in my life I thought I would be on a cruise ship to Panama or the Mediterranean, retired with my Tilley hats, my sneakers. But I’m a single lady now, and I want to keep working,” she says. “Because I don't have to work 365 days of new material into a year, I can still take some time off to paint and travel.”
Yes, we must mention the divorce in all interviews. This is the part I don’t quite understand about this whole thing. Who says she has to have 365 days of material? Gary Trudeau takes vacations and certainly Lynn Johnston, with a top 5 strip, could do the same. My guess is that when Gary Trudeau takes vacations from doing Doonesbury, the syndicate must not be able to charge for his product. My local paper buys another strip to fill in the space during the absence. Instead of doing like Trudeau, Lynn is trying to come up with a way to take vacations and still get money. One of the papers is dropping For Better or For Worse precisely for that reason. This last year, they felt they were being cheated because they got charged for a new strip the same as the reprint. For Lynn to be successful, a lot depends on her audience’s desire to see this new material, even though 50% of it will be old, and as time goes on, even more of it may be old. Otherwise a newspaper may be tempted to say, “I’ll pay for the new stuff and buy a different strip when she does reprints.” If they are not allowed to do that with an “all or nothing” policy, then a lot will depend on the appeal of her new material.
“When I first started the strip, the comic’s style was fast and loose, probably because I was so busy and I had to get it out fast,” she says. “It had a happy freedom to it. What I’m experiencing now by redrawing, it’s almost like I’m drawing portraits. I'm changing John's jaw. And over the years, Elly's nose grew up to the size of a potato. Now, I'm drawing it smaller again, the way it was when I first started to draw. There is a huge difference between the earlier and the later styles.”
This seems odd to me. I wouldn’t describe her old style as fast and loose, but more like young and inexperienced. Many young artists draw things like an artist they admire draws things. Then eventually they will develop their own style, or learn to draw things from models or real life. Young Lynn Johnston’s style was a rip-off of Charles Schulz and her children’s characters were obviously drawn as take-offs of the Peanuts characters Linus for Mike, and young Sally for Elizabeth. Lynn says she is imitating her old style, but from the examples I have seen over the last year and the example she has in the video, all she really means is that she is going to draw John and Elly a little more realistically and less cartoony than they have gotten in their old age. The video strip looked like her same modern style of putting together a strip.
posted by howard at 12:42 PM
8 Comments:
howard,
With stories set in 1979, Lynn will no longer be faced with a giant cast of characters, where she touches on each of them for a little bit each month. It’s Elly, John, Michael, and Elizabeth all in one place. If she tells a story in that time period, she will probably complete it, so there should not be any waiting through the old material until the new material returns in order to finish a story.
Which will make everyone, especially her, happy. The interview clearly indicates that she too is confused by the messy convolution her experiment became. As for the Tome of Destiny, it would seem that the strip for 31 August 2008 is a teaser as it's an American Grafitti-like indication of what the characters get up to in later years.
dreadedcandiru2,
As for the Tome of Destiny, it would seem that the strip for 31 August 2008 is a teaser as it's an American Grafitti-like indication of what the characters get up to in later years.
The use of the August 31 strip like that makes me wonder if there will ever be a Lives After Lives Behind the Lines kind of book. Lynn did not mention it this time, and if she is doing 50% new material this next year, she may not have the time. A single strip would be a lot easier.
I love how she says that the strip used to have a "happy freedom" to it, and then talks about how what she's doing now will be different. I guess it will be sad, depressing, and convey the feeling of imprisonment? Sounds like something Lynn would be good at!
It also cracks me up how she talks about the divorce causing her to change her mind about retiring. I see two possibilities:
1) She didn't want to retire in the first place, and was only doing it to placate Rod;
or
2) She feels the need to build her bank account back up again after Rod drained it by taking his chunk.
Actually, it's probably both.
qnjones
It also cracks me up how she talks about the divorce causing her to change her mind about retiring. I see two possibilities:
1) She didn't want to retire in the first place, and was only doing it to placate Rod;
or
2) She feels the need to build her bank account back up again after Rod drained it by taking his chunk.
I am pretty sure (1) is true. She has changed her retirement date so often, even before she knew Rod was cheating on her, that it is easy to believe she didn’t want to retire. If Rod wanted to do any significant traveling, then being tied to a daily strip would have made that difficult.
As for the bank account of (2), I wouldn’t be surprised by that either. Rod had to have some money, owning his own dental practice, but For Better or For Worse is all over the place as a top 5 distribution comic strip. Between that and the merchandising, Lynn has to be worth quite a bit more than Rod, and as the real-life John Patterson, he can certainly make a case that he contributed his fair share to the strip.
Also, I don’t think there would be all this effort to try to appease the newspapers, the syndicate, and the long-term readers if Lynn was not seriously concerned about the loss of income. Otherwise, she would just take vacations like Gary Trudeau does.
howard,
Also, I don’t think there would be all this effort to try to appease the newspapers, the syndicate, and the long-term readers if Lynn was not seriously concerned about the loss of income. Otherwise, she would just take vacations like Gary Trudeau.
So, we have a randy git using his ex as an ATM so he can cut a swath through the North Bay bar scene to thank for the Reload. Now I remember why I started hating Rod in the first place.
I am pretty sure Farley was a second year character, so if he shows up in October, this clearly shows that Lynn Johnston is no longer pulling only from her first year for reprints.
I read this differently. I think Lynn is still going to begin from the beginning, but retcon when they get Farley, because she thinks he's so friggin' special she can't bear the thought of the strip waiting until the second year during its rewind.
Clearly then, this is not intended to be a reprinting in chronological order.
Disagree. I think she's going to begin at some earlier point than where she started in 1979--maybe Liz's birth. Then she'll do the newly drawn prehistory strips until she gets up to the point when the strip started. Then we'll get the strips in order--with newly drawn strips inserted here and there where Lynn wants to expand on/create arcs.
Hopefully it also means that Lynn will pull out the strips that do not play well in the modern day, i.e. all the “John is a sexist pig” stories.
Possible--but this would require that the bitterness subside.
DreadedCandiru2,
So, we have a randy git using his ex as an ATM so he can cut a swath through the North Bay bar scene to thank for the Reload. Now I remember why I started hating Rod in the first place.
Maybe, maybe not. As I recollect, she planned to do the hybrid before the announcement about her divorce. She was going to finish off the wedding by September, 2007 and the hybrid was going to be reprints mixed with some new stuff featuring the modern characters, but no aging and no storylines.
aprilp_katje,
I read this differently. I think Lynn is still going to begin from the beginning, but retcon when they get Farley, because she thinks he's so friggin' special she can't bear the thought of the strip waiting until the second year during its rewind.
How could she do that and maintain a chronological reprint? The storyline pretty specifically shows the kids getting Farley as one of a set of puppies from Mrs. Baird, if I remember correctly.
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