Author Archives: fborfwnews

Lynn’s Article on BoingBoing: Syndicated Strip or Graphic Novel?

Lynn's Article on BoingBoing: Syndicated Strip or Graphic Novel?

Lynn was recently invited to write an essay on cartooning for BoingBoing, “The award-winning zine, blog and directory of mostly wonderful things.”

When I was barely 20 years old, I got married. My husband and I settled into an old apartment in Vancouver, near English Bay. He was working for the CBC as a cameraman and I was an ink and paint artist for Canawest Films. I wanted to be an animator and was learning the industry from the ground up. We did commercials, public service announcements and piece work for Hanna Barbera. I was one of 16 young women hired to hand colour acetate cells. Having signed an agreement to not join a union, we took shifts and worked around the clock for $1.50 an hour. It was hard work, but I learned quickly and I realized that an animator makes other people’s drawings, other people’s characters, other people’s dreams come to life.

Read the rest here!

St. Patrick’s Day Fun!

Enjoy our two Saint Patrick’s Day games, for a very limited time!

Lucky Leprechaun – uncover matching tiles to win. Test your memory!

Good Green Fun – click the matching icons to clear the board.

Do You Collect Comics Clippings? Can You Help Us?

[UDPATE: Thank you to everyone who helped – we’ve located all the strips!]

As IDW Publishing puts together the next of Lynn’s treasury books, we’re looking for some help to re-create the vintage colouring from when the strips were originally published, in 1983 and 1985. We’re missing some parts of specific strips – here is a list of dates, below, followed by images of the strips in question.

Full strip needed:
Dec 4, 1983
Dec 11, 1983
Dec 18, 1983
Top row of panels needed:
Sep 2, 1984
Sep 15, 1985
Sep 22, 1985
Nov 10, 1985
Dec 29, 1985

Thanks for looking! We’ll be very grateful if you can help us locate the colour references!

– Lynn and the team.

Remembering Mort Walker: Updated

[Update: here’s an excellent article in celebration of Mort Walker, by Jason Whiton]

I met Mort Walker, and some of his wonderful family, when I went to my first Reuben Awards in New York in 1986. To me, Mort was a bit “larger than life”. He was one of the first professionals to welcome me into the National Cartoonists Society. He was attractive, outgoing, jovial, and busy. Beyond his work as a comic strip artist and author, Mort seemed to be involved in anything that would promote, preserve and legitimize comic art and cartoonists in North America. He believed cartoons should be respected and cared for. How thankful we are for his foresight.

Before I met Mort in person, I had read his book “Backstage at the Strips“. If you are an aspiring cartoonist…or even if you just want to dig into this treasured text, this book is a bible. Mort and his friends got together to talk about writing, drawing, and living in the world of comic art. I don’t think such a how-to book for cartoonists had ever been published before, but “Backstage” was a thorough analysis–seriously written, but in a funny way. This book not only taught cartoonists, it legitimized what we do. Continue reading →

The Booklist Reader Interviewed Lynn!

Read “I Did Some Funny Stuff: An Interview with Lynn Johnston, Creator of FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE” on The Booklist Reader website. Here’s a snippet:

Re-examining my work from the beginning, I see how I progressed as an artist and as a writer. I was doing the best I could do at the time under pressure from deadlines and from parenting two busy kids. I did some funny stuff. I can see that now, and it makes me laugh out loud.