This is a list of works by Lynn Johnston, Canadian cartoonist.
These collections, published by Andrews & McMeel, contains reprints of the comic almost as it appeared in the daily newspapers. Although, many of the early books such as Keep the Home Fries Burning and It's All Downhill From Here do not contain Sunday strips. The Sunday collections cover Sundays up until around 1985. However the Sundays from around 1986-87 were not published in an FBorFW collection. You can find them all at fborfw.com. They are listed in chronological order; each book spans about a year in time. They lag approximately two years behind the strips' original publication. For example, She's Turning Into One Of Them! was published in 2006, containing strips dealing with April's 13th birthday in 2004 (publication date shown in parentheses). Michael and Deanna's wedding in the book With This Ring was published in 2003, two years after their 2001 wedding.
In 2010 Andrews McMeel began publishing Treasury collections of Johnston's work. The collections include reprints of the original strips and the new-run strips from 2008 onwards. Various strips include insights written by Johnston about the inspiration for a strip or story arc.
When the first collections appeared, the Sunday strips were not included in them - only the dailies were included. Instead, the following two 'Sunday' collections (also published by Andrews & McMeel) were published. Each book contains full-color reprints of 79 Sunday strips. While the strips appeared in the Sunday paper each week, and thus are part of the overall storyline, they are not included in the list of the "Chronological" collections and are not mentioned on the official "For Better or For Worse" website. These books are:
These books include a 'retrospect' section, and usually some autobiographical and/or "behind the scenes" information. In particular The Lives Behind the Lines has biographies of all the major and many minor characters, including information not otherwise explored in the strip. The first two books also include the year of most recently printed comic strips.
These "little books" combine character illustrations from the strip with inspirational text or verse.
Gift books are similar to little books, but are in a larger format.
In the early 1990s, Tor Books published a series of standard-paperback strip collections.
| For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library | |
|---|---|
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | The Library of American Comics |
| Schedule | annual |
| Format | Hardcover |
| Genre | Drama Comedy Slice of life Gag-a-day |
| No. of issues | 7 published of 9 planned |
| Main character(s) | Elly Patterson John Patterson Michael Patterson Elizabeth Patterson April Patterson Farley the Dog |
| Creative team | |
| Written by | Lynn Johnston |
| Artist(s) | Lynn Johnston |
| Editor(s) | Dean Mullaney Kurtis Findlay |
A book series which collects the complete run of For Better or For Worse, published by Library of American Comics.
The series was first announced in March 2017 with a planned release date in October the same year.[1][2][3]
It was presented that the series would comprise nine volumes in total, three each per decade of the strip's original run. The books was to be made with the input from the creator, Lynn Johnston, while being edited by Dean Mullaney, Kurtis Findlay and Lorraine Turner at LoAC.[4] This For Better or For Worse complete series became the first non-American comic strip title to get a own collection in The Library of American Comics' line of publications.[5] In November 2017 the first volume was finally released.[6]
The volumes of this series measure 11 inches × 8.5 inches, (280 mm × 216 mm), oriented in landscape view and are hardcover.[7][8] The daily strips are reproduced in black-and-white and the Sunday pages in full color, both arranged in consecutive chronological order.
Compared to most other books series from LoAC the volumes of this one lacks sewn ribbon bookmarks[9] and dust jackets but this is compensated by the high page count at around 540 pages per tome. The MSRP of each volume is set at $39.99 to $49.99.
Due to a misprint, volume five of the series paper stock came to be a semi-glossed type. The sixth and following volumes will go back to have the matte paper stock originally used for all other books of the series.[10] [11]
Kurtis Findlay assembled all the cartoons with help from Katie Hadway (daughter of Johnston as well as executive director of Lynn Johnston Productions) and Stephanie Vandoleweerd, web designer and archivist. Findlay also wrote introductions and had the role as a overseer of the project. Since this edition is a "Complete Library", a lot of material that had been neglected or discarded from previous trade paperback collections have in this series been included.[12] Notes to the plots have been added to the margins by the creator,[13][14][15] taking up reader reactions, own insights, even occasional regrets. The paper stock is of thick good quality.[citation needed][16]
Color restoration
Every Sunday strip has been recolored in order to make the collection more cohesive in between the different decades of it and also making it more appealing to contemporary readers. When the comic industry started its migration over to digital coloring in the early 1990s the whole coloring process changed. The effort to recolor these later years of the strip therefore are a different story. One challenge was the for 2020s standard low resolution original print files, the for its era high resolution digital files used during those years of the strip.[17]
Amendments
The comic strips' original run ended in 2008, however, Johnston continued to update some of the older strips and also created a number of new strips in order to expand upon some storylines and character development, as well as fixing older continuity faults. After 2010 she felt she had accomplished this and stopped adding new additions to the strip once for all. However she still to this day (2018) fixes minor flaws, like updating cultural references for the strips that are in reruns, e.g. changing a SNES controller to a contemporary equivalent, and adjusting the retail price of coffee. All the significant changes will be included in the volumes of this series.[18]
| Volume | Release date | Title | Period | Page count | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2017-11-14 | “For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library - Vol. 1” | September 9, 1979–January 1, 1983 | 544 | 978-1-63140-982-0 |
| 2 | 2018-07-31 | “For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library - Vol. 2” | January 2, 1983–July 5, 1986 | 544 | 978-1-68405-256-1 |
| 3 | 2019-07-16 | “For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library - Vol. 3” | July 6, 1986–December 9, 1989 | 544 | 978-1-68405-426-8 |
| 4 | 2020-03-24 | "For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library - Vol. 4" | December 10, 1989–April 24, 1993 | 544 | 978-1-68405-585-2 |
| 5 | 2021-01-12 | "For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library - Vol. 5" | April 25, 1993–August 31, 1996 | 544 | 978-1-68405-750-4 |
| 6 | 2022-03-23 | "For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library - Vol. 6" | September 1, 1996–January 1, 2000 | 536 | 978-1-68405-896-9 |
| 7 | 2023-10-03 | "For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library - Vol. 7" | January 2, 2000–May 3, 2003 | 536 | 978-1-68405-896-9 |
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