Lynn Johnston on comics and "real" art

LYNN JOHNSTON:...I was looking in a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and they only give [Charles Schulz] two quotes out of the whole thing. Of course, they only give Jesus one. And I said to myself that I was going to take five minutes and come up with more than two quotations. So I opened up -ー I think it was the 35th anniversary book, and in five minutes I wrote down six or so others that could really have been in Bartlett's. They were really fine, brilliant, quotable quotes. And I told that to him. I couldn't believe they gave him only two quotes. Cathy Guisewite is someone else who writes very quotable quotes. Why aren't they in Bartlett's Friggin' Quotations? They've got all these things by Aristotle that no one ever heard of before.
TOM HEINTJES: I think it all comes down to something that you and I and everyone who loves comics have to battle on a daily basis, and that is the general public's dismissal and trivialization of anything associated with comics. I was showing some of my cartoon work to a coworker who is a fine artist, She didn't really know I could draw before I showed her my stuff, and she looked at it and said, "Wow, Tom, if you have this kind of talent you might be able to do some real art one day!" And she wasn't trying to offend me. It was just a natural thing for her to say, because it was comics and therefore not "real" art.
LYNN JOHNSTON: She actually said that to you... wow. Here's an anecdote for you. The first time I went up to Charles Schulz's house, the first time I had spent any real time with him, the first thing he wanted to show me was a drawing he had done of a street in France he had seen while he was there during the war. I looked at this beautiful, sensitive illustration of the houses and the cars, and he looked at me and said, "I really can draw." All of us feel that way.