'For Better Or For Worse' Cartoonist To Divorce

It wasn't for better or for worse after all. Lynn Johnston whose "For Better Or For Worse" comic strip is based on life with her husband, Rod Johnston, and their two children, intends to divorce.

"He fell in love with somebody else," the cartoonist known to a hundred million newspaper readers across North America, told the Chicago Tribune. "It had been over a long period of time," she said, pausing and adding that it had come as a surprise to her. In fact, she had been planning her retirement to spend more time with her retired dentist husband. Instead he left in April 2007 and she expects to be divorced by April of next year.

In an interview with CBC on Nov. 2, 2007, Johnston was asked about the separation. "I can't believe it happened, but it did," she said, holding back tears. "People change...feelings change," said Johnston, now roughly sixty years old, adding that all you can do is wish the other person well. Straining to keep her voice stable, she said the separation was being handled with "graciousness" and "care". But she admitted it had been "tough". 

Johnston's children have not disappointed her though. "I'm just thrilled with my children, the fact that they are adults and they're not in jail," she said laughing. The fact that Kate and Aaron are both "my best friends" makes her feel as though she succeeded as a parent. She describes them as "happy, mature, strong, wonderful people." Kate is an art student and Aaron, she said, is doing well in a career that he started on his own. [Since this article was posted, Johnston said in a December interview with CBC's George Strombopoulous that Aaron worked in media. A few years earlier, she had mentioned in an interview that he was a news cameraman who had covered a car accident scene only to discover that the victim was his former girlfriend.] She raised both her children with Rod Johnston, although her son Aaron was a product of her first marriage. 

Johnston, who was raised in North Vancouver, lives in Corbeil in northern Ontario, Canada. She moved there with her children and husband who became a flying dentist with his own plane. 

In recent years, Johnston has developed a neurological disorder which at times causes tremors in her arm. For that reason she has an assistant to help with drawings for her comic strip.  [Update: In her December interview with George Strombopoulous, Johnston said her condition was in remission, an occurrence which she called "wonderful".]

Johnston is winding down her comic strip for which she had a 20 year contract. She feels out of touch with "the new electronic age and all the new vocabulary...and the way kids dress and talk." She fears she would begin to come across like a 60 year old who didn't know what she was talking about.
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