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| ACEC |
| A cartoon is loosely defined as a humorous sketch. But at what point do drawings cross the satirical line to become cartoons? It's hard to know. There are classic drawings that could easily be classified as caricatures -- several by Leonardo da Vinci come to mind -- while some cartoons would not be out of place in a museum devoted to conventional graphics.
The first known North American caricatures were drawn in 1759 during the battle for Quebec. Brig.-Gen. George Townshend, third in command to British Gen. James Wolfe, had a reputation in London as a fair caricaturist. Townshend started doing wicked caricatures of Wolfe, to the amusement of his fellow officers. As author Gordon Snell puts it in his newly published book, Further Fabulous Canadians: His fierce and expert artistry Was savage and perfidious: He made the General out to be Deformed and crass and hideous. His colleagues found the cartoons fun With laughter they were pealing; But when the General spotted one He nearly hit the ceiling. Upset by the insulting portrayal, Wolfe wanted an official inquiry. However, as we all know, he died on the Plains of Abraham and -- how auspicious for Canadian cartooning! -- it was George Townshend who accepted the surrender and signed the peace treaty. Political Cartooning Although political cartooning was popular in Canada and elsewhere in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it wasn't until the 1940s and '50s that the form really came into its own here. For that we can thank three brilliant individuals. Robert LaPalme, Len Norris and Duncan Macpherson lived in different cities and, in styles very distinct one from another, dealt with thoroughly different subject matter. LaPalme is particularly remembered for his devastating political cartoons in Le Devoir during the reign of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis. Norris became a household name in Vancouver through his portrayals in the Vancouver Sun of local social and political foibles. Macpherson was best known for his hilarious Toronto Star cartoons of John Diefenbaker and other politicians of the 1950s through the 1980s. All three earned international acclaim and put Canadian political cartooning firmly on the map. Perhaps even more importantly, Norris, Macpherson (both at one point illustrators for Maclean's) and LaPalme gave Canada a thirst for good cartooning. Gag Cartooning The late 19th century saw the emergence of a new kind of cartoon that poked fun at life and social pretensions. Gag cartoons were featured in Bob Edward's Calgary Eye Opener, perhaps Canada's best-ever satirical magazine, as well as The Goblin, an early-1920s Toronto monthly that eventually moved to Montreal. The Goblin became a template for The New Yorker, which appeared on the scene several years later. Our most ingenious gag cartoonist, George Feyer, was born in Hungary in 1921. A survivor of both Nazi and Communist regimes, Feyer forged papers in order to flee to Canada, arriving in Toronto in 1948. Before long, his first gag cartoons began appearing in Maclean's and, until the mid-'60s, he was the enfant terrible of Toronto's media set. A great deal of his prodigious output appeared in magazines, books and on TV -- and the exposed backs of women attending parties in cocktail dresses. But his cartoons focusing on sex and religion were thought too outrageous to be published in his day (as with his take, above, on the Last Supper). Comic Strips From the early to the mid-20th century, many Canadian comic strips came and went, defining who we were by what we laughed at. Two of the most popular -- one English, the other French -- had a rural focus. Jimmy Frise's Birdseye Center was an immensely popular feature in the Star Weekly for years, while in the Montreal-based Bulletin des Agriculteurs, Albert Chartier's character Onésime helped chronicle rural life and attitudes in the Quebec of his day. However, it was only in the late1970s that a newspaper comic strip artist from Canada achieved international stature. Lynn Johnston has drawn her syndicated strip For Better or For Worse since 1979. It now appears in some 2,000 newspapers in 20 countries. Johnston thinks of her work as a "continuity strip" because, while most comic strips remain frozen in time and place, her well-known characters have aged over the years. We've followed children developing into adulthood and adult characters ripening into old age. In one particularly memorable sequence, Johnston allowed the beloved family dog Farley to die. For Better or For Worse has always been celebrated for its realistic portrayal of the joys, trials and tribulations of the small-town Patterson family, based very loosely on Johnston's own clan in northern Ontario. The strip's most controversial sequence involved the "coming out" of Lawrence, best friend to teenaged Michael Patterson. Appearing daily over a four-week period in 1993, this groundbreaking sequence generated hundreds of letters of complaint, mostly from the American South. Comic Books The first comic books, which appeared in the 1930s, were collections of previously drawn strips. However, comic books soon started to have their own story lines. Fantasy comics, influenced by science fiction, also caught the public's fancy. Superman, one of the original action heroes, was drawn by Toronto-born Joe Shuster, who moved to Cleveland at the age of nine. Shuster and his high school friend, writer Jerome Siegel, conceived the Superman character in 1933, but success was by no means instantaneous. Nearly every major comic syndicate rejected the idea before DC Comics bought it five years later. Shuster drew all the Superman storyboards until 1947, when he and Siegel left DC after a legal dispute over ownership of the strip. Underground Comics The counterculture movement of the 1960s and early '70s produced an array of colourful underground newspapers featuring such fantastical comic strip artists as the brilliant Americans Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. Canada's most infamous alternative cartoonist was Rand H. Holmes, best remembered for his notoriously drug-addled hippie characters in Harold Hedd, a strip drawn for Vancouver's Georgia Straight. Holmes often ridiculed real-life authority figures, such as Vancouver Mayor Tom Campbell or the city's vice squad. In some respects, graphic novels -- expanded, quality comic books for an adult audience -- might seem a natural progression from the underground comic of the '60s and '70s. In fact, the format has many roots. Japanese art has included the tradition of imaginatively drawn books for several centuries. Whatever their actual lineage, graphic novels have become immensely popular over the last few decades, with the work of three Ontario-based cartoonists attracting international attention. Seth (né Gregory Gallant) is a thoughtful cartoonist whose nostalgic work focuses on small-town life, typified in his Palookaville series. Of all Chester Brown's work, perhaps the most striking is 2003's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. Painstakingly researched, the 272-page book took five years to produce. But of this group, Dave Sim is certainly the most eccentric. Cerebus, his self-published series, ran from 1977 to March 2004 and, at 300 usually monthly issues and a total of 6,000 pages, is the longest-running comic-book series ever produced by a single cartoonist. Cerebus descended at times into near madness as Sim used the strip as a vehicle for his paranoia. Nonetheless, it always had its devotees. The Village Voice called Sim's output "a staggering declaration of independence." |
| DRAWN AND QUARTERED By Terry Mosher MACLEAN'S MAGAZINE Canada has a proud history of pointed artistic commentary |
| Source: MacLean's Magazine |