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| ROY Peterson has one of the best jobs in the world.
Like a columnist, he gets paid to make fun of the economic and political elite and the snotty-nosed whiny rich. Yet because of his humble gnome-like nature complete with bushy beard, Peterson's unobtrusive ego seems to make him more at ease when he unleashes his brush and quill on the powerful. "It's my job to kick them in the ass," Roy Peterson remarks about his role as Canada's pre-eminent editorial cartoonist. Weeks later in May of this year he would win his seventh National Newspaper Award. "I think my job is really to attack the powers that be and its power that you're really attacking and power corrupts," Peterson contends. Casually dressed in loafers and button-down shirt, Peterson lets loose about engaging in character assassination in a subdued, mellow voice. He doesn't hob-nob with the chattering classes but he drives them crazy. He offends those who need to be offended. That's his contribution to our culture. If you are powerful and in public, he will savage you with his caricatures. Get out the knife and get in line. He has that effect on people, mainly politicians, who succumb to his scalpel's work. He has drawn Indira Gandhi, Eddie Shack, Robert Stanfield, Leonid Brezhnev, Henry Kissinger and Lucien Bouchard with unreserved wrath. The first issue of Maclean's magazine when it went to a weekly in 1978 featured Pierre Trudeau cowering in a corner -- or for half a day it did at least. The publisher at the eleventh hour pulled the cover that Peterson had laboured over when the presses were about to roll. The Vancouver Sun ran the cartoon, slightly abridged, the following week. Although Peterson draws four cartoons a week plus other commissioned work, fewer international caricatures than before find their way into his work as he prefers the loony political climate of British Columbia. His chain-smoking illustrations of Rene Levesque, the five o clock shadow of Tricky Dick Nixon and the wily Pierre Trudeau from the '80s are part of every op/ed reader's mental imagery. His barrages of Slobodan Milosevic cartoons during the Kosovo crisis have yet to find their form. But characters take a while to develop and the cartoonist is always grasping for a nose, a leg, something prominent that stands out in an individual. Nestled away in West Vancouver with his Punch memorabilia and World War Two video collection, Roy Peterson would never let on that his craft could be a dangerous one. He never has to face the violence that occurred in India last March. Irfan Husain, an editorial cartoonist for Outlook magazine was murdered -- stabbed 28 times and slit in the throat for depicting the wrong person in a cartoon. Kevin Kallaugher, a cartoonist with the Baltimore Sun, who knows Peterson and has met other editorial cartoonists in Third World countries, believes the role of the cartoonist is much more important where illiteracy rates are high. "People can't read in many countries but they understand the cartoon. Unfortunately most of those countries censor the cartoonist from freely drawing important public figures," Kallaugher said. But Canada shares the British sense of humour, which is more deeply rooted in satire. "Roy is one of only a few people who can pull the trousers down off (the powerful). America is a bit adolescent satire-wise," Kallaugher said. As he settles down in the plush brown leather couch of his cosy little backyard studio, one thing you notice right away about Peterson is he's like a friendly giant. He has a soft chuckle and the soothing voice of a bartender. Despite the beard and Grizzly Adams persona he's a softie underneath. He once even had a gerbil that answered to Mr. Bill. Peterson has the luxury of working from home, the garage turned studio an additional tax write-off he enjoys. He has worked at a desk at a newspaper but prefers to spend the time with his wife, Margaret, enjoying the reclusiveness of the North Shore. "I'm as organized as a cartoonist can be. I have a wife, which is the secret. She is very organized and tries to keep me on course," Peterson admits. The décor of the one-floor house is, well, cluttered bibliophile-cum-Ralph Lauren. Roy and Margaret collect Northwest aboriginal facemasks, old leather books (classics only) and everything Ralph Lauren from chairs to wallpaper. Old English pub paraphernalia adorn the walls in a kind of culture clash. Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator for the Cartoon Research Institute at Ohio State University, knows Peterson's work and said Americans have a narrower view of satire than do Canadians. "American editors are different. They don't want their golf buddies to be mad at them. Canadians draw more wicked characters," said Caswell. She prefers "people who take a stand like (Peterson). The best are those who have a fire in their belly." Peterson's wife Margaret acts as his editor and spell checks the finished copy before sending it to the paper. "I don't have any part in his thought process," she said. "Cartoonists are notoriously bad spellers and I check it before it goes off." Peterson's roots are as genuine as the satire he dishes out. He was born in Winnipeg in 1936, moving to Vancouver in 1941 and has worked as an editorial cartoonist freelancing for The Vancouver Sun and Maclean's magazine since 1962. That year he moved to West Vancouver where he and Margaret, who was carrying their third child, bought a small house for $15,000. Peterson had been working for Woodward's and Eaton's advertising departments and unsuccessfully submitted gag cartoons to magazines like the Spectator in Britain, the Saturday Evening Post and Look magazine when he met his wife Margaret through her best friend. "This is totally going nowhere," he told himself at one point having just quit his advertising job. His neighbour thought he was crazy. But after a year and a half of having sold nothing, Peterson received three replies in the mail one day accepting his work. He had persevered, taking every course in figure drawing; life drawing, commercial art and theatre set design. The latter eventually led to a job at the CBC as a set designer. Later Peterson started to fill in at the Vancouver Sun for Len Norris, the ultimate social commentary cartoonist who derived his style from the Giles school of animation. Norris. Like the popular British cartoonist Giles, Norris occasionally used hundreds of characters to fill a work. Peterson thought the only way he could forge his own style was to go in the opposite direction and concentrate on individual political caricatures. Peterson was influenced by the styles of David Low in Britain and Duncan MacPherson in Canada and more predominantly by Ronald Searle of Punch magazine. "I try to put the detail into one main person with no detail in the background. Ben Wicks would take 20 minutes, sit down and watch the news and draw his cartoon in three or four lines. I try to get some interest into the characters and the caricature and work the thing out and hold the interest of the viewer," Peterson said. Peterson continues with his philosophy a la Roy. "When I started out I was middle left. I saw how they screwed it up and now I say a pox on all your houses. I'm in the radical middle now. "I draw my cartoons from the average person's view who is not in a political party and not going with a certain gang but he s being affected by what those people do, whether they are liberal or conservative or communist," Peterson said. Money and success have ruined many people who have shot to the top of their professions content to peer down on the rest from their white ivory towers. Peterson has been rewarded in his own way, largely by the support of his peers and raising a family of five with his wife Margaret. Nevertheless, Peterson has won numerous National Newspaper Awards, served on both the Canadian and American Editorial Cartoonist's associations and has had his work exhibited in the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa and other places abroad. He has illustrated many books including the best-selling Frog Fables and Beaver Tales series. Peterson prefers not to rock the boat in conversation, acknowledging only so much blame for newspaper management and their lawyers when it comes to curtailing his work. He is grateful to his editors at the Sun, recognizing the importance of a good editor. Peterson defines an agreeable editor as "one that has enough competence to leave the cartoonist alone." "But from the employer's side he or she has to be sure he can leave the cartoonist alone. The cartoonist needs time to come up to speed," Peterson said. The problem Peterson explains, is in the United States when the baby boomers rose. "A lot of kids wanted to be cartoonists and draw editorial cartoons and didn't have any idea of what editorial cartooning was or what their own political feelings were. "They were producing a lot of jokes with no bearing on what was going on. Newspaper editors liked them because they weren't controversial and they could run these things as fill," said Peterson. Peterson delights in the ammunition handed him by British Columbian political figures from the Bennett family to Phil Gaglardi, Grace McCarthy, Gordon Wilson and now Glen Clark. "In B.C. it's pure entertainment. It's frontier politics and its left or right but nothing in between, which is unfortunate for the average person," Peterson said. "For a cartoonist it's great. It's like being a pickpocket at a public hanging. We get a lot of strange people." When the Victoria Times-Colonist cartoonist Bob Bierman depicted then Minister of Human Resources Bill Vander Zalm picking the wings off a fly, the British Commonwealth had its first cartoon libel suit in over a half century. The case, which was overturned in Bierman's favour, allowed more flexibility in roasting political figures. "The decision gave almost carte blanche to the editorial cartoonist. We have much more scope than we thought we ever had," Peterson said. "You can't totally smear a person. But you do have the right to do a lot of things editorial cartoonists didn t think they had a right to." Asked if he has taken advantage of that ruling, Peterson said no. It s not the politicians but the friends of politicians who get incensed. "The friends will send you nasty letters and want you fired and call the editor," Peterson said. He still gets one or two letters a year from irate readers. Once someone called The Vancouver Sun to say that Peterson better not stand near a window. He once drew a cartoon about former Ontario premier David Peterson who was promoting Ontario as though it was all there was to Canada. Peterson was drawn wetting his pants in Ontario wine which offended many prominent personalities in the West. Peterson said if he doesn't get those letters from incensed people he's not doing his job. He doesn't want his work to be just "space fill." "Canadians want to get along," Peterson said. "They don't want arguments. They want to do the right thing quietly and that's what I do on the page." Asked how he handles working alongside the ego and prominence of Maclean's columnist Allan Fotheringham, whose column Peterson's cartoon appears in each week, Peterson defers politely. He is content to take a back seat to fame. "[Fotheringham] really bends deadlines and I've seen some pretty warped deadlines in my time," Peterson quipped. The two have collaborated on several collections of both their writings and drawings Collected & Bound and The World According to Roy Peterson. Fotheringham will often read phrases on the phone to give Peterson an idea of the column. "Once he told me a Japanese-Canadian dentist in a kilt was at a party but didn't end up mentioning it in the article. I drew the dentist in full Highland regalia," Peterson said. Now the two compare notes more thoroughly. "Editorial cartoonists think that they are changing the world but they're not really," Peterson acknowledges. "Comic strip cartoonists are wise enough just to do the little joke type of stuff and make a million dollars but the editorial cartoonists are penniless essentially. I don't have the Olympic size swimming pool or the two or three phones," he said. Roy Peterson may not have a swimming pool or three-car garage, but he is content. |
| ROY PETERSON Cartooning Canada with a common touch By Brady Fotheringham North Shore News -- August 16, 1999 |
| Source: North Shore News |