Lynn Johnston on drawing as a child

TOM HEINTJES: Did you devise any sort of escape mechanism for the life you had?
LYNN JOHNSTON: I was very reclusive. I spent hours and hours in my room drawing. That was my other release, and that was my way of surviving. You see, anything I imagined, I could draw. And I found that if I was in a terrible depression and I closed my eyes, the blackness would appear to go on forever. But if I put it down on paper, it was no bigger than 8 ½ by 11, and I could deal with that. If you have a horror inside of you, it goes down to your marrow. But on paper, it's not so bad.
TOM HEINTJES: So drawing became a form of therapy.
LYNN JOHNSTON: It was a way to survive. If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper. ［laughter］ If I wanted to draw funny pictures, I would draw them, and I remember loving watching my brother laugh at them. My brother was a great audience, and if he liked the picture, he would laugh and laugh and laugh, and he would want to keep the picture. Making people laugh with an image I had created ... what power that was!