Some years back, Lynn Johnston apparently suffered from dystonia, which made it harder for her to draw; she hired assistants. But she discovered it was triggered by hormone replacement therapy; she stopped HRT & got better.
She would prefer to not work & still get paid. But perhaps offering straight re-runs wouldn’t pay as well, especially since papers & their budgets are shrinking. She was dropped by some when she stopped the ongoing story.
To those who follow the strip, quality seemed to fall off in the last few years of The Patterson Saga. Perhaps she was losing interest.
I do believe she was losing interest and am really disappointed she married Liz off to the awful Anthony and his pornstache. She disappointed a LOT of readers who fantasized there could have been an excellent spinoff strip of the adventures of a (single) Liz. I suppose with her problems she just wanted to wrap the whole thing up with a gooey wedding, which is every middle class girl’s dream, right? … And, this is important, she said words to the effect that her best work was when the kids in the strip were small and could say cute things and get into kid-type situations. I don’t think she can relate to adult relationships so well. The kids grew up, had adult problems and situations that weren’t so easy to make funny or cute, so the strip came to a logical end. The current re-runs with a little new thrown in are great for Lynn as she can walk down memory lane with her funny li’l folks, and still get paid. I think newspapers should all band together and ban her completely, though.
Y’all keep talking about this like it’s a bad thing. It may not be fine arts (debatable, but let’s not do it here) but she is an artist. Artists are supposed to bring their own emotions and senibilities to their work.
Reading salinqmind’s post, suddenly I think she should be praised for not going all sitcom-y and having conveniently adorable toddlers constantly pop up out of nowhere. You know, orphans, long lost cousins, babies from post-menopausal pregnancies, kids some characters forgot they’d had…
Michael already had two toddlers. Elizabeth & Anthony were ready to produce their own hell-spawn & he had a daughter by the Evil Therese. Johnston could easily have continued the story, concentrating on the younger generation. Maybe it was too much work. At one point, she even said that she didn’t know how to write for little kids any more. (Her own children remain unmarried, thus failing to produce any grandchildren.)
It’s just that she took a strip that was pretty good for a few years and ran it into the ground. Then re-started it–while adding bits that destroy the continuity. And prove that she doesn’t write little kids very well.