Michael: Browse The Strips

Wednesday June 26, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Girls with the name "Elizabeth" did not appreciate this strip. I recently heard from a reader who said that after all these years, her brother still calls her "lizard breath!"

Saturday June 29, 2019

Lynn's Comments: This never happened to my brother and myself, nor to my own kids. I just thought it was a plausible outcome. I was following in the footsteps of Farley Mowat. When I asked him (referring to his book "Never Cry Wolf") if he actually ate mice, he said, "If it didn’t happen, it SHOULD have." Truth and artistic license blur sometimes when it comes to a good story.

Monday July 1, 2019

Lynn's Comments: This series posed a bit of a conundrum when we started animation. We see a window in the basement of the house here, but other illustrations of the downstairs showed no window at all. A complete layout of the house had to be made, and this meant some "creative architectural drawings!"

Wednesday July 3, 2019

Lynn's Comments: A week ago, some dear friends from North Bay came to town and we had a chance for a good long visit. In reminiscing about how long we'd known each other, they reminded me that they had hired my son to mow their lawn one summer. That was his first job! He will be 46 soon. How time flies.

Friday July 5, 2019

Lynn's Comments: This idea became the basis for one of the animated shows we did in Ottawa. I enjoyed working with two other writers who were able to stretch a few cartoons into a 26-minute special.

Sunday July 7, 2019

Lynn's Comments: This was done just as the helmet laws were getting serious. The youngest riders were all wearing them. Older kids defied their parents' warnings and went for "the wind in their hair."

A young boy we knew well was critically injured when he suddenly swerved across the street in front of his house— right into the path of an oncoming car. He was not wearing a helmet and hit his head on the edge of the sidewalk. He was raced to the hospital in critical condition. The driver was entirely blameless. The boy’s parents were given the awful choice of surgery, which would likely result is a seriously brain damaged child, or taking him off life support. His mom said, "Let’s give him a chance." The surgery and recovery are quite a story but he survived, and with time and lots of therapy, he grew up to be a healthy and productive young man. Ironically, one of the postoperative requirements was that he wear a helmet for awhile to protect his head. It was a happy ending to a nearly tragic accident and every kid in town afterwards wore a helmet when they rode their bikes.

Wednesday July 10, 2019

Lynn's Comments: My summer job was always in my parents' jewellery store. My main duty was to dust and wipe fingerprints off the glass counters. I was quite envious of a friend of mine who got a job serving ice cream at one of the malls. She had a cute uniform and was always talking to kids our age. It was a very busy, social place. Later, when I told her how much I wished I'd had her job, she said that after standing all day digging hard ice cream out of the freezer, her back ached, her feet hurt and her arms had never ached so badly in her life! …The grass is always greener on the other side!

Saturday July 13, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Here, Michael is served the one thing he really doesn’t want to eat.

My Aunt Margaret worked at Moir’s Chocolates during the 1950s. Every year, she’d send us a box of chocolates for Christmas. I thought she had the best job in the world. One year, when I was about 10, she came with her family from Ontario to Vancouver to visit us and I told her I would love to work in a chocolate factory. She laughed! She told me she was sick of chocolate! Apparently, the day she was sent to the packaging floor of the factory, she was told that all the employees were invited to eat as much chocolate as they wanted. She dug in! After two days, she had no desire to eat, touch or smell chocolate, and that everyone else felt the same. The Moir’s Company policy paid off. Sadly, Margie’s dislike of chocolate lasted the rest of her life!

Monday July 15, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Here’s another punch line that could never be translated! When strips like this one reached international papers, the dialogue, and therefore the gag, had to be changed entirely. The translators who did this were excellent creative writers who often had an almost impossible job.

Wednesday July 17, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Any time I've done a cartoon workshop, I tell my students to not try to be perfect; that there’s no such thing as perfect. But, if you do the best you can possibly do, the results are always very, very good. No matter what my job has been, that advice has always worked for me!

Sunday July 21, 2019

Lynn's Comments: When this strip first ran, the girls asks the boys if they had change for a dollar because they needed to use a payphone. We updated the dialog not only to remove the payphone reference, but we also thought the girls should confront the boys about their behaviour!

Monday August 5, 2019

Lynn's Comments: Here's an interesting note about the animated version of this story: Animation is an extremely expensive way to make a moving picture. The studio often runs out of money, which is when some awful compromises are made. By the time we got to this scene, we were told that there was no more money for animation, the storyboard imagery would have to be cut, and that the fact that Michael was on a busy street corner with people and cars going by would have to be "fixed in post." This means that the editor, camera operator and people in the sound department (post production), would have to make the busy street "happen" without the visual imagery. If you watch the film you will see that every time there is a close-up of Michael and the hot dog stand, there is a flurry of sound. Cars, horns, people walking, dogs barking...all these sounds are inserted and the viewer believes that a load of activity is going on. Then, when there is a long shot, showing the hot dog stand from across the street, for example, there is nothing going on in the background at all! This was a very clever way to eliminate a lot of expensive work. This happened far too often when we did the animated shows and the results weren't always successful. The words, "fix it in post" are a joke in the industry, meaning that a studio will often leave the most impossible "fixes" to the post production crew!

Sunday August 11, 2019

Lynn's Comments: For years these kinds of cartoons (about wolf whistles and smart remarks directed at girls) were not considered in bad taste. In fact, this behavior was expected, and as a girl being whistled at by boys in a passing car (depending on the way it was done), I thought was funny and fun. Times have changed…and for the better.

Monday August 12, 2019

Lynn's Comments: When I was 16, I went to Montreal to visit my mom's sister Monica and her family. It was the time of greased hair and Elvis wannabes. My cousin Marty had the best hair. He wore it in a perfect "duck tail" with a suave curl on the forehead. He looked like he was right out of "West Side Story." His dad, my uncle Maurice, owned a Cadillac convertible and was happy to load all of us kids into it. I was surprised when Marty complained that his dad was putting the top down—the rest of us were thrilled. My memory of that drive to the country is Marty crouched in the back trying to keep his hair straight while the rest of us enjoyed the wind.