Here is the part where the author, Todd VanDerWerff, describes Lynn's panel:
I do attend a Spotlight panel for For Better Or For Worse creator Lynn Johnston, mostly because some weird part of me thinks it would be hilarious to live-tweet it while the rest of the world is live-tweeting the Firefly panel I would have had to have been in line for at 3 a.m. to attend. But I end up getting weirdly engrossed in the Johnston panel, and I start to remember that there was a time when I was as engrossed in FBOFW as I have been in any serialized novel, that there was a time when the storyline where Lawrence, Michael’s friend, came out, and it was genuinely transgressive and daring. At her height in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Johnston was doing a newspaper comic strip that was a worthy successor to things like Gasoline Alley and the like, and if it fell off toward the end, when she seemed uncertain of how to wrap everything up, well, she was going through a lot of shit at the time.I took a look at some of the tweets, and one of them on the "small town gossip about her ex-husband" reads, "I found out recently that he's passed out twice from Viagra overdose. Small towns are cool!" Lynn Johnson, on her second ex-husband. Hrm, if she thinks she held back because Aaron was present, I hate to think what she might have said had he not been.
Johnston’s a gregarious, surprisingly funny presence, with a dark sense of humor you wouldn’t expect, given what she’s most famous for. She discusses small town gossip about her ex-husband (who left her for a woman half his age) with a vengeful, silly gleam in her eye, and she carries on about her apparently lonely war to get a buttcrack into the nation's comics pages. The whole thing is literally just Johnston holding court and talking about fan mail she’s received and sketching FBOFW characters on the overhead projector, and although I mostly came in just to sit down, the room is eventually completely filled with people who are eating out of her hand. She’s like your cool aunt who lives in the big city, the one who lets you have a little wine over dinner, and she makes for a terrific guest. (And if you want to know more about this panel—and I know you do—I did, indeed, live-tweet it.)
Here's an intriguing tweet: "She's reading letters she got when she killed Farley. Perhaps she will read my missive about the CHARACTER ASSASSINATION OF CONSTABLE PAUL." Now I want to find that missive, don't you?
And how about this one? "If you change anything about a character in a comic (strip), you've kind of lost that character." Lynn Johnston ON NEVER CHANGING ANYTHING. [If you want to find more of his #foob tweets, it @tvoti and the tweets are from July 13.]