For Better or For Worse: The Comic Art of Lynn Johnston

For thirty years, cartoonist Lynn Johnston made daily additions to what would become a monumental body of work: her newspaper comic strip, For Better or For Worse. Chronicling the daily lives of the middle-class suburbanite Patterson family - Elly and John and their children, Michael, Elizabeth, and April - Johnston’s strip was ground-breaking in its adherence to narrative and emotional realism, and its refusal to engage in melodrama, superpowers, or anthropomorphic animals. As the syndicated strips appeared in daily newspapers through the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s, these characters aged with their readers, and their trials and tribulations were the same as those of their readers: the daily struggles of work, family, school, and bureaucracy.

Wildly funny and formally innovative, For Better or For Worse: The Comic Art of Lynn Johnston will be published to coincide with an international touring exhibition of Lynn Johnston’s work, organized by the Art Gallery of Sudbury. The book features some of Johnston’s most popular narratives, interspersed with an essay that chronicles the development of her drawing, her life, influences both personal and artistic, and the history of her wildly successful comic strip. This book also gathers together a generous selection of Lynn Johnston’s daily comic strips and Sunday pages, spanning the lives of the Patterson family.

Whether readers are new to Johnston’s work or old fans returning to it once again, they’ll find this book to be a rich treasury of For Better or For Worse.