Canadian cartoon artist, the creator of “For Better or For Worse” with 100 million readers daily worldwide. She began drawing her stories of the life of a Canadian family with their neighborhood and friends in 1979. It is a sit-com in real time that deals with real issues in the lives of a family we can all relate to and care about and is syndicated in 1,700 newspapers, reaching some 104 million readers.
Over the years she has tacked such topics as child abuse, death and mid-life crisis. When one of her teen-age characters came out as being gay, she was dropped by 19 papers – and picked up by 56 new papers. Over 3,000 letters came in, about 75% of them supportive. Though Johnston’s real life does slip in, she has an agreement that she will not use things her kids and friends tell her in confidence.
She, the same as her character, Ellie, is married to a dentist and has two kids. The daughter of a watchmaker and his wife, a stamp dealer, as a kid she drew to vent her frustrations. “I was really an angry girl, even in grade school, ” she said, ” I wanted to be grown up.” Johnston dropped out of the Vancouver School of Art halfway through a four-year program in fine arts. She drifted into a series of animation and illustration jobs, and an unhappy first marriage left her with a six-month old son and a divorce at age 28. In 1974 a collection of her cartoons about pregnancy was made into a successful book and her career began to move ahead. Two more books followed and soon, she had a contract to syndicate her cartoon strip about the Patterson family.
In 1975 she met Rod Johnston and they were married a year later. In 1985, she was named Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, winning the Oscar of the cartooning world, the Reuben Award.
Link to Wikipedia biography