Elizabeth: Browse The Strips

Friday March 29, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I once spent all day hiding in the lane because I was afraid my mom would find out that I had broken the milk bottles on our front porch. It was an accident. I’d been swinging a hula hoop and hit them by accident. In the end, she was angrier at me because I’d gone missing, and not because I’d knocked over the bottles.

Tuesday April 2, 2019

Lynn's Comments: One more thing that really happened. I began to think my kids and husband owed a huge debt of gratitude to the strip...which happily ate up anything I could make into a daily or Sunday cartoon.

Sunday April 7, 2019

Lynn's Comments: The Fasts and the Bergans were friends in Lynn Lake; two of our favourite families. I loved to put the names of people we knew in the strip. It was a funny surprise. After the strip was published, their friends and family would contact them! It was a wonderful, continuing surprise.

Sunday April 14, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I read somewhere that a composer looked at birds perched on wires and saw a musical pattern in the way they positioned themselves. He then set these patterns to music. Anyone know if this is true?

Sunday April 21, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Any opportunity to draw Farley at his scruffy best, gave me a thrill. I loved to draw him eating and scratching and burping and being thoroughly, happily disgusting. Not only was he great fun to draw, I had to “get into the spirit of the dog” in order to draw him well. Being Farley for a few hours was a happy, funny and relaxing time...and I have to say, he really was my favourite character!

Wednesday May 15, 2019

Lynn's Comments: We had one bathroom in our house on 5th Street. If Dad came home in a bad mood, we all ran for the comfort of the “throne” before he could lock himself in there and relax. I once went to visit Harry Morgan (of “Mash” fame.) While showing me around their LA house, his wife said, “Lynn, Harry and I have been married a long time and I gotta tell you, the secret to a happy marriage is having separate bathrooms!” I have to agree.

Sunday May 19, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I try to make a comment about each of these cartoons but there are times when nothing comes to mind. Where ideas come from has always been a mystery. When I first joined the National Cartoonists Society and could finally talk face to face with cartoonists I'd admired for years, the thing we'd discuss most was: “where and how do you get your ideas?” If you have the gift, ideas come. Ideas come when you are on a deadline and have no choice but to produce something. Good or bad, the idea has to be written, drawn up and sent in. It's a real job.

I have no idea where the idea for this strip came from, except that it seemed like a good gag at the time—and if I was to do it again, I'd change the colour. I think it would look better if the word “Worse” was in turquoise and if Mike had a deep turquoise shirt! Otherwise, it still looks OK!

Monday June 3, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I loved referring to Canadian history, customs, places and geography. Before I signed my contract with Universal Press, one of the editors insisted I refer only to the United States—that the strip had to be about Americans. I asked him if he, born and raised in Kansas, could write knowledgeably and realistically about a family in New York. He admitted he could not. I said, if I couldn’t have my characters live in Canada and write what I knew, then I wouldn’t sign the contract.

Tuesday June 4, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I signed the 20-year contract. For Better or For Worse was "made in Canada" and the content proved to be acceptable everywhere. In this strip, the idea came from my mother, who told me she had once, in grade school, mixed up the words population and copulation on a test. Yup! …Good stories deserve to be retold!

Thursday June 6, 2019

Lynn's Comments: The truth is, it was my son who needed the glasses. This scenario was happening, but I shielded him by making Elizabeth the one who was having trouble in school. Things like this were often hard on my kids as they tried to explain to their friends what their mom was doing and that their lives did not run parallel to the characters in the strip.

Friday June 7, 2019

Lynn's Comments: I think I’ve said before that the word "stoopid" ruffled a lot of readers' feathers. Many times I had to explain that despite the spelling, this is the way some words sound. They were not appeased. Artistic license is not necessarily a license to misspell!