I just read something today that made me scratch my head and wonder "Why?" Lynn Johnston is kind of ending her popular comic strip, For Better or For Worse, this Sunday. I say "kind of" because she is but she isn't. Go look at this link. I'll wait.
Did you read it? Good. You probably share my puzzlement. If you didn't go to that link, here's the gist of it: The storyline that has made up the past 29 years of For Better or For Worse is coming to an end this Sunday, only to be relaunched from DAY ONE on Monday. That's right, Ms. Johnston is hitting the rewind button and going all the way back to 1979. Essentially, she's going to all of her old strips and re-drawing and re-writing some of them and telling the whole story all over again. Michael and Elizabeth will be kids again, April will be a newborn (when she finally shows up) and Elly and John will be younger and parents of little kids. Oh, and Farley the dog will be back.
Here's the part where I become a jerk: This sounds to me an awful lot like just trying to keep a steady paycheck rolling in and less about the art. She claims that she wants to revisit those stories with the experience and technical craft that she has at her command now, but I don't entirely buy that. Now, I've never been someone whose head was so far up in the clouds that I can't realize that art and commerce must coexist, but... criminy, this is just rehashing old work. If she wants to stay in the game, as she purports in the article, then why not either keep the strip going or start a new strip? I think that part of it is that, no matter how many comic strip collections she's sold and how many papers her strip runs in (about 2000 papers), FBOFW doesn't have the broad marketability of, say, Garfield or Peanuts, where plush toys, animated cartoons, movies, musicals, etc. have been made of those strips. As much as readers love the Patterson family and their friends, no one wants a Michael Patterson action figure. Farley the dog (who died saving an infant April Patterson) - OK, there you got me, people might want a plush of him.
To a limited extent, I can understand why she's doing this: cartoonists essentially work for ourselves. We have no health insurance, no 401K (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is), no benefits whatsoever besides the ones that we are able to procure for ourselves. Doing a full rewind means that she will still be earning her standard rate for her strips, but for much less work, thus ensuring that she will be able to provide for herself in her later years.
Mind you, I know that I do not have the career that Ms. Johnston does and may not ever have one like it, since newspapers are dying off like flies hitting a bugzapper, but I feel that she can keep the story going if she really wants to. Part of her desire to rewind may have to do with her divorce from her husband of 32 years; looking backward at happier times is so much easier than going forward into an uncertain future. Believe me, I know all about that.
OK, I'm done being a jerk (for now). With my luck, this sort of thing will bite me in the butt in the future:
"Rob, this is Lynn Johnston. Lynn, this is Rob Chambers."
"oh, yes. I remember your little rant about me in 2008."
"Umm, yeah. Nice to meet you." The temperature drops by 15 degrees with the icy stare directed my way.
Take care,
~Rob
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I don't see it as working over what's already been done. (Sorry, hon!) Don't you ever look at something you've done before and think, what if the characters got to do this thing that I didn't think of at the time I wrote the story? So she won't be redoing the same story line, she'll be adding new stories along the same timeline. I think it's kind of neat.
Post a Comment