In Print
I got this response from Lynn Johnston to a letter I sent to the Coffee Talk on the For Better or For Worse website. Her response and my original letter follow:
Dear P.
You are absolutely correct. I am revising the original work and I am going by the books I have in print rather than the actual story the way it originally ran. What you have discovered is a breach of storyline and there will likely be many!
Thanks for your diligence in finding this ...I certainly appreciate your accuracy!!
Lynn J.
-----Original Message
-----Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 11:15 AM
To: chrisdreger@eastlink.ca
Subject: Coffee Talk Submission
Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by{me} on September 15th, 2008 at on September 15th, 2008 at 10:15AM (EDT).
location: Oro Valley, Arizona
question: Lynn Johnston,
I am really confused about your new-runs and I hope you can help me. As I understood your story, Farley the dog appeared over a year before Richard Nichols was born. It appears that you have reversed this. Unless I miss my guess, the new-runs appear to be a rewrite of the old storyline, and I should throw any of my expectations about the order of things out the window. Is this correct, or am I misinterpreting what you are doing?
Submit: Spill Your Beans
If you check the collections for sale in the on-line store over at the For Better or For Worse website you will notice that the first 2 collections in chronological order are:
Collection #2: Is This "One of Those Days," Daddy? (Aug 1982)
Collection #4: Just One More Hug (Aug 1984)
Collection #1: I've Got the One-More-Washload Blues... (Aug 1981) and Collection #3: It Must Be Nice to Be Little (Aug 1983) are not listed. I double-checked at http://www.amazon.com/ and found the same thing. Collections #1 and #3 are not in print. Collections #2 and #4 are.
Without Collection #3, you miss the birth of Richard Nichols. With Collection #2, you have the arrival of Farley. With Collection #4, you have the Nichols kids as they appeared recently in the new-run strips.
Two possibilities for this creative choice by Lynn Johnston appear in my brain:
1. She didn’t keep, or does not know where she put her copy of Collections #1 and #3, especially since the staff has been laid off and can't find them for her.
2. She is all about the money and is writing the new-run strips to include only those elements of the early strip for which a collection can be purchase.
I favour the second of these two, because Lynn specifically told me “in print”. This strange idea popped into my head. Suppose you are Lynn Johnston and you have this inventory of collections in print, and you want to get rid of them. They are already printed, so costs in having them are:
a. The storage space to keep them in good condition.
b. The shipping costs to send them to someone.
How do you get someone interested enough in your old strip to buy these things? Answer: The new-run. Here is the beauty of the idea.
You have new strips to attract the attention of persons who will read anything For Better or For Worse, but never read the old stuff. Then you reprint part, but not all of the collections. The people reading the reprints will say, "I think I would like to read the rest of this story that has not been reprinted. I am so intrigued." Then a collection gets purchased, and before you know it, all those collections sitting around collecting dust are bought and the bulk of the money goes into Lynn Johnston's pocket.
Why didn't this work with the hybrid? Because the hybrid reprinted from the first collection, which no one can buy. That must be the reason for that failure. With the new-run we solve that problem because the storyline is completely about the time period of the purchaseable collections, and we have none of this "get back to the modern storyline" stuff to distract the collection-purchasers.
When you think about it, this is genius. Lynn gets to keep her newspapers, gets to take long vacations during the reprints, AND she finally gets rid of those collections taking up space in her closet, which no one would buy because they are so old.
The best part is that she pretends she is doing this as a means to correct or to flesh out her art. From her last modern strip:
"If I could do it all over again... Would I do some things differently?... I've been given the chance to find out!! Please join me on Monday as the story begins again... With new insights and new smiles. Looking back looks wonderful!"
Let me correct this. "Looking back in my storage closet and seeing a lot fewer unsold collections, looks wonderful!"
Dear P.
You are absolutely correct. I am revising the original work and I am going by the books I have in print rather than the actual story the way it originally ran. What you have discovered is a breach of storyline and there will likely be many!
Thanks for your diligence in finding this ...I certainly appreciate your accuracy!!
Lynn J.
-----Original Message
-----Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 11:15 AM
To: chrisdreger@eastlink.ca
Subject: Coffee Talk Submission
Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by{me} on September 15th, 2008 at on September 15th, 2008 at 10:15AM (EDT).
location: Oro Valley, Arizona
question: Lynn Johnston,
I am really confused about your new-runs and I hope you can help me. As I understood your story, Farley the dog appeared over a year before Richard Nichols was born. It appears that you have reversed this. Unless I miss my guess, the new-runs appear to be a rewrite of the old storyline, and I should throw any of my expectations about the order of things out the window. Is this correct, or am I misinterpreting what you are doing?
Submit: Spill Your Beans
If you check the collections for sale in the on-line store over at the For Better or For Worse website you will notice that the first 2 collections in chronological order are:
Collection #2: Is This "One of Those Days," Daddy? (Aug 1982)
Collection #4: Just One More Hug (Aug 1984)
Collection #1: I've Got the One-More-Washload Blues... (Aug 1981) and Collection #3: It Must Be Nice to Be Little (Aug 1983) are not listed. I double-checked at http://www.amazon.com/ and found the same thing. Collections #1 and #3 are not in print. Collections #2 and #4 are.
Without Collection #3, you miss the birth of Richard Nichols. With Collection #2, you have the arrival of Farley. With Collection #4, you have the Nichols kids as they appeared recently in the new-run strips.
Two possibilities for this creative choice by Lynn Johnston appear in my brain:
1. She didn’t keep, or does not know where she put her copy of Collections #1 and #3, especially since the staff has been laid off and can't find them for her.
2. She is all about the money and is writing the new-run strips to include only those elements of the early strip for which a collection can be purchase.
I favour the second of these two, because Lynn specifically told me “in print”. This strange idea popped into my head. Suppose you are Lynn Johnston and you have this inventory of collections in print, and you want to get rid of them. They are already printed, so costs in having them are:
a. The storage space to keep them in good condition.
b. The shipping costs to send them to someone.
How do you get someone interested enough in your old strip to buy these things? Answer: The new-run. Here is the beauty of the idea.
You have new strips to attract the attention of persons who will read anything For Better or For Worse, but never read the old stuff. Then you reprint part, but not all of the collections. The people reading the reprints will say, "I think I would like to read the rest of this story that has not been reprinted. I am so intrigued." Then a collection gets purchased, and before you know it, all those collections sitting around collecting dust are bought and the bulk of the money goes into Lynn Johnston's pocket.
Why didn't this work with the hybrid? Because the hybrid reprinted from the first collection, which no one can buy. That must be the reason for that failure. With the new-run we solve that problem because the storyline is completely about the time period of the purchaseable collections, and we have none of this "get back to the modern storyline" stuff to distract the collection-purchasers.
When you think about it, this is genius. Lynn gets to keep her newspapers, gets to take long vacations during the reprints, AND she finally gets rid of those collections taking up space in her closet, which no one would buy because they are so old.
The best part is that she pretends she is doing this as a means to correct or to flesh out her art. From her last modern strip:
"If I could do it all over again... Would I do some things differently?... I've been given the chance to find out!! Please join me on Monday as the story begins again... With new insights and new smiles. Looking back looks wonderful!"
Let me correct this. "Looking back in my storage closet and seeing a lot fewer unsold collections, looks wonderful!"
posted by howard at 5:38 PM
4 Comments:
She may not be the most talented artist in the field but she is shaping up to be the most gifted huckster. Her slippery-as-quicksilver biography and bafflegab-laden "admissions" or error lead me to believe that she has not much respect for the truth. Money, yes, honesty, no.
I don't think it's going to work out for her, though. IMHO, there is nothing very interesting about the strips she is drawing now. I have a lot of disposable cash and an interest in FOOB, but I will not be buying the old collections because she's boring me to tears with the new stuff, and the reprints she's done thus far are worse because they are obviously outdated.
While there are people more interested in FOOB than me, most of them probably have kids and not as much disposable income.
Interesting that she is willing to trash her legacy for a few bucks though. Look at the nice, high-dollar collections of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes that have come out recently. What Lynn is doing will make it impossible for her work to ever be comprehensively reprinted in a treasury edition. She must really be feeling poor because it always seemed to me that Lynn wanted herself to be thought of as being in Schultz's league, and as having been better than Watterson. Now she's made a mess of her legacy, and doesn't seem to care.
Maybe Rod really did rip her off and leave her broke.
DreadedCandiru2,
Her slippery-as-quicksilver biography and bafflegab-laden "admissions" or error lead me to believe that she has not much respect for the truth. Money, yes, honesty, no.
When I see her in live interviews, she seems to me to someone who slips in and out of real life to fantasy pretty easily. Sometimes I can’t tell if she is intentionally dishonest, or if she just can tell what the truth is any more.
qnjones,
Look at the nice, high-dollar collections of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes that have come out recently.
They are beautifully done, especially the Peanuts ones.
What Lynn is doing will make it impossible for her work to ever be comprehensively reprinted in a treasury edition.
That’s true. But on the other hand, she makes a lot more money with her 2000 papers than she would make on a high dollar reprint collection.
Now she's made a mess of her legacy, and doesn't seem to care. Maybe Rod really did rip her off and leave her broke.
Maybe he did. But you have to consider that Liz has been trashing her legacy for years now.
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