Lynn Johnston

Lynn Franks Johnston
Brad Mackay (left), Director of the Doug Wright Awards, inducts Lynn Johnston into The Giants of the North: the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame in August 2008
Born	Lynn Ridgway (1947-05-28) May 28, 1947 (age 69) Collingwood, Ontario
Nationality	Canadian
Notable works	For Better or For Worse

Lynn Johnston, CM OM (born May 28, 1947) is a Canadian cartoonist, known for her newspaper comic strip For Better or For Worse. She was the first woman and first Canadian to win the National Cartoonist Society's Reuben Award.

Born Lynn Ridgway in Collingwood, Ontario, she was raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design) with hopes of making a living as an artist. After working briefly in animation, she married in 1969 and moved back to Ontario, where she worked as a medical artist at McMaster University for five years. Johnston's illustrations are in storage in McMaster's medical archive. They include depictions of routine hospital happenings, such as a father smoking in the waiting room.

While expecting her first child, she drew single-panel cartoons for the ceiling of her obstetrician's office. Those drawings were published in her first book, David We're Pregnant, which was published in 1973 under her then name of Lynn Franks (and subsequently republished under the name of Lynn Johnston) and became a best seller. After her divorce, she did free-lance commercial and medical art in a studio converted from a greenhouse. Hi Mom! Hi Dad!, a sequel to David, was published in 1975. Shortly thereafter, she met and married dental student Rod Johnston.

In 1978, the Johnstons and their two children relocated to Lynn Lake, Manitoba. She was asked by Universal Press Syndicate if she was interested in doing a comic strip. She sent twenty copies of a strip called The Johnstons, based on her family "since we were the only people I knew I could draw over and over again with some consistency." Much to her surprise, the syndicate approved of the initial strips and offered her a twenty-year contract. After a six-month "work-up" period, the strip first appeared in newspapers throughout Canada under the title For Better or For Worse. The strip has been carried by about 2000 newspapers in Canada, the U.S. and 20 other countries.