Vance Rodewalt is standing in a bathrobe in his backyard slinging peppermints at coyotes.
"I hit one in the butt once-he was sunning himself in the neighbour's yard," says the 58-year-old cartoonist,
scanning the ravine behind his Bowness house.
Once he's certain it's safe, he lets his corgi-Pomeranian cross, Tyke, out to play. Besides keeping his
cul-de-sac free of predators (or at least ensuring they have fresh breath), Rodewalt is awaiting his usual
9:55 a.m. call from Doug Firby, his editor at The Calgary Herald where he's worked for 22 years.
Today, though, it's already after ten and the call hasn't come. Rodewalt's getting frustrated. The first day
back after the holidays, the newspaper's resident political cartoonist admits he filed his roughs a bit late
this morning and may have missed hearing back from Firby before the editor went into a long meeting.
"Five days a week I send him three sketches and then wait for his choice," explains Rodewalt.
He never knows which one Firby will approve for the next day's editorial page. Having to choose a
favourite himself, he says, would be "like being caught in my underwear and then being asked if it's my
favourite pair."
An odd simile coming from someone who seems totally un-selfconscious about his scribbles. In any case,
he prefers to make Firby "do his editor's job," and so he'll wait, possibly until after noon, to get started on
the final version, always due by 4 p.m. With his grey moustache, sticking-out hair and candid (if somewhat
gruff) manner, Rodewalt is a cartoonist version of W.O. Mitchell. He is also a thinker and an artist with
better thing to do than talk about his art. He obliges, though, because it's not often he has the opportunity
to vent about the slow death of his profession.
If one were to caricature Rodewalt the political cartoonist, one might depict him as a seasoned frontier
cavalryman-eagle eyes, broad belly, ironic grin-holding down the fort in a lonely outpost, watching the
world from a lookout platform with an extreme viewpoint. Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton
would be scurrying about beneath the lookout, trying to escape the cavalryman's bullets as they muddled
their way along the campaign trail.
John Larter, another Calgary cartoonist who claimed recently that "political correctness has turned
political cartoonists into wienies," would be in the background, roasting on a stick over an open fire.
As for the "Indians" which every archetypal frontier scenario requires, well, we'll get to them later.
The sight of Canada's current prime minister dodging bullets might offend a few dyed-in-the-wool patriots,
but then again, if satire isn't offending somebody, it's not doing its job. Anyway, Rodewalt-one of an
increasingly rare breed of mavericks willing to put forth an unpopular critical opinion-likely wouldn't care
what anyone thought. Which may be exactly what makes him so valuable.
Rodewalt lives in a big, storybook house beside a railroad track with his former
Canadian-champion-ice-dancer wife, Susan Carscallen, and their two teenage sons. He started life on a
ranch near Edmonton, where his father was a horse dealer.
"I remember he named one of the racehorses Vance's Rocket," he says with a laugh. "It was fun and, like
most ranch kids, I was pretty weird. When we moved to Edmonton, I couldn't get over the idea of
sidewalks-to me they were like these little roads."
Once he got the hang of city life, however, Rodewalt never looked back. In his autobiographical notes in
The National Cartoonists Society Album 2005-a kind of who's-who yearbook of the cartooning
universe-Rodewalt writes of his rural upbringing: "I was bit and kicked, and shoveled out way too many
stinky stalls." Once he left home, he says, without a hint of regret in his voice, "that was it for ranches and
horses. It's a hard life and if there's no love involved, it doesn't work."
Instead, Rodewalt fell for cartooning and spent his teens haunting magazine and newspaper stands "until
they threw me out and I'd go find a new one."
He sold his first gag cartoon at age 14, to Community Life magazine in Edmonton. After graduating from
high school, he worked drawing ad cartoons for a publication called The Roughneck where, when he quit
in 1969, he put in a good word for his friend John Larter (the aforementioned wienie).
It was in '69 that Rodewalt sold his first editorial cartoon, to the Edmonton Journal. "I think it had to do with
jaywalking," says Rodewalt, who was soon scooped up by the Calgary Albertan.
During his 10-year stint there, Rodewalt made trips to L.A., where he was taken on as a freelancer by
CYCLEtoons and Hot Rod cartoons.
"I was pretty confident in those days," he says of his 25-year-old self. "I went to New York to check out the
scene and started at the top, which, back then, was Mad Magazine."
It was a gutsy move and one that paid off: for five years, Rodewalt worked as a freelance illustrator for
Mad, Cracked, Parody and Crazy magazines, drawing satirical cartoons relating to TV and movies.
When the Albertan was replaced by the Calgary Sun in 1980, Rodewalt stayed on for a couple more years
until one of his cartoons paved the way for a career at the rival paper.
"It was the Herald's 100th birthday," Rodewalt explains, "and I drew a cartoon for the Sun showing a spunky
young kid in a baseball cap saying to an old codger on a bench, 'Happy Birthday, Uncle Herald.' "
The publisher of the Herald at that time was the late Patrick O'Callaghan, and he liked the illustration so
much he asked a friend at the Sun to find out what Rodewalt would charge for the original. "I said it would
cost him lunch," says Rodewalt. "I'm not entirely stupid. I heard opportunity knocking and I answered."
Though the Herald already employed a full-time staff cartoonist named Tom Innes, O'Callaghan took
Rodewalt to lunch at the Petroleum Club and hired him three weeks later-but only after successfully
convincing Rodewalt that Innes, an old friend, would also stay on.
"It was awkward," says Rodewalt of his first months at the Herald. "It was so obvious that they were
pushing him out and pulling me in."
Innes continued cartooning for the editorial page until he retired in 1986, while Rodewalt illustrated the
newly created comment section. These days such an embarrassment of cartoon riches at a local
newspaper is virtually unheard of. Most North American papers no longer carry one, let alone two, full-time
political cartoonists. And, as the old guard retires or-as was the case last year for one bright star in the
cartooning galaxy, Michael Ramirez of the Los Angeles Times-is forced out, they are not being replaced.
"Ramirez is a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist and he's looking for a job," says Rodewalt, shaking his head.
It's a similar situation in Canada: Merle Tingley at the London Free Press retired in 1986 and was not
replaced; when well-known artist Cam Cardow left the Saskatoon Star Phoenix a few years back, nobody
new was brought in. Larter faced an even harsher fate when he was first fired from his job as cartoonist
for the Calgary Sun four years ago and then asked "to come back at half the income. They wanted me to
beg for the life preserver," he says. "I swam away."
Indeed, newspapers have been letting their resident cartoonists swim away in startling numbers: two
decades ago, American newspapers employed 200 cartoonists; now, there are 80. Canadian artists have
fared a little better, relatively speaking, with that number dropping from 32 in 1993 to 27 currently-though
many cartoonists worry that Canadian publishers will follow the U.S.'s lead. The oldest tradition in western
newspapers-and one that consistently pulls in the highest marks in reader surveys-is in grave danger of
going out with the tide.
The most frequent explanation for the endangerment of the political cartoonist is decreased newspaper
circulation due to the accessibility of electronic media, which has forced editors to cut budgets. The
employee who spends his or her day (incidentally, only one Canadian paper, the Ottawa Sun, employs a
female cartoonist) caricaturing politicians-potentially inciting angry letters from readers who might in turn
cancel their valuable subscriptions-is the first to go. These changing conditions have made syndication a
more viable option: instead of paying a staff cartoonist $300 for a drawing, newspapers can access work by
a dozen or more cartoonists from all over the world at $35 a pop.
It's an option, Firby says, "that threatens the great cartoonists like Vance."
But Rodewalt, surprisingly, comes to the defense of the trend by calling syndicates good, cheap resources
for small-town papers that can't afford to hire a cartoonist.
"Editors and bean counters have to look at their budgets and ask, 'Why pay a resident cartoonist's wage
when we could pay so much less for a syndicate?' " he says. When it comes to big-city papers, however, he
condemns those that choose a syndicate over a local artist as lethal to the integrity of journalism. "They're
sacrificing the local angle," he complains.
Guy Badeaux, cartoonist for Ottawa's Le Droit and editor of Portfoolio: The Year's Best Canadian Editorial
Cartoons, agrees, adding, "the papers are letting their cartoonists die of attrition because they claim they
have fewer problems when there's no local content. And, unfortunately, people don't seem to notice,
nobody complains. It's depressing."
Rodewalt himself often caricatures national or global events, but he says, "I approach it with a local angle
by, say, drawing a couple of old cowboys talking about it in a bar."
Such a colourful, Calgary-specific mise-en-scene would not be generic enough for a syndicated cartoon
which has to satisfy a broad range of audiences. Although it's the immediate, close-to-the-nerve relevance
that gives an editorial cartoon both its humour and its sting for readers of local papers, that's precisely
what's being lost when an editor runs a syndicated cartoon. But Rodewalt suggests that, rather than just
being the 'oh, well' result of money-saving measures, the move to syndication reflects a cultural shift. He
offers a more controversial explanation for the decline of the political cartoonist; namely that controversy
itself is under attack.
The rise of political correctness, which, says Rodewalt, "kind of snuck in the back door a few years ago," is
perceived by many cartoonists,including Rodewalt, as a problem. "Everybody is so terrified of offending
someone that a distortion like a cartoon is suspected of being a dangerous thing."
This pressure to produce increasingly bland cartoons, says Rodewalt, is exactly what he and his
colleagues will get together to "talk and drink non-stop about" at a cartoonists' convention in Denver this
spring. "Opinion," he laments, "outrageous opinion, is under attack. It's being watered down and that's
hurting editorial cartooning."
Despite the challenges facing his profession, Rodewalt says his hand has never been forced. "I always
seem to fit," he says, extricating himself from the colourful mess at his kitchen table to make a third pot of
bitterly strong Cowboy Coffee. Perhaps his adaptability can be explained by the fact that, "as critical as I am
of politicians, I've never claimed to have the answer." Such a claim, he believes, "is exactly the trap the
people I criticize have fallen into."
Herald publisher, Peter Menzies, calls Rodewalt's cartoons "magnificent, especially in an age when there's
so much political correctness. To be able to make sport of the rich and powerful, to be a satirist, is really
cool."
But when does making sport become unsportsmanlike? Consider a controversial Rodewalt cartoon that
ran in the Herald just before the '88 Olympics (it's reproduced on this week's Table of Contents on Page 3).
"There was no vicious intent," says Rodewalt. "Maybe I had a little more personal involvement because my
wife was in the Olympics, but anyway, the Indians had some gripes that I don't recall now and they wanted
to make a point by blockading the road. The athlete in the cartoon has lowered the torch like a lance and
runs through the blockade. In the last frame, the Indians are kind of singed and torched, their feathers are
burnt and one's saying to another, 'You got any other bright ideas?' " (In the caricature of Rodewalt
imagined earlier, this particular First Nations group might be depicted shooting flaming arrows at the
artist.) Rodewalt claims he was shocked by the flood of angry phone calls, letters and cancelled
subscriptions that resulted when the cartoon ran in the Herald.
"It was called racist and all kinds of other things. I just thought it was funny. Problem was, it showed the
Indians in a losing situation," he says, then adds, half-annoyed, half-bewildered, "That's the other thing-you
have to say Natives now, not Indians."
"Vance doesn't always realize when something might be offensive," says Firby when reminded of the
offending cartoon. "He's not a politically correct guy. I don't know too many cartoonists who are. But some
of the best cartoons are politically offensive. And there's a certain naivete to Vance that I love."
Larter, who, starting mid-January, will be added to the Herald's roster as a freelancer on Rodewalt's days
off, believes whether you call it naivete or nerve, cartoonists have lost their-well, let's let him nail it. "I
got started right around Watergate," he says, "at a time when everybody had balls. And we need that even
more today than we did back then."
Having said that, Larter also believes there's a place for political correctness in cartooning. While at its
worst, the movement shrinks the range of opinion to a suffocatingly narrow band, at its best it protects
those who would suffer unfairly from unchecked ridicule. As Rodewalt himself admits,"The best cartoons
are those that are easy to understand quickly and that inflict pain only on the politician."
Larter agrees: "If (a cartoon) is litigious or unfair or hurtful to the wrong people, I don't want to have been
the one to have drawn it," he says, adding, "You don't want to turn into cream-of-wheat cereal, but I think if
we use tact, common sense and wisdom, we can say what we want and it'll hold up." If cartoonists are
careful, says Larter-and he believes Rodewalt takes care-they can still effectively do what they do best;
that is, "nail the politicians."
Proof Rodewalt walks that line like a pro, is a photo stuck casually to a cupboard door in his kitchen. It's a
chummy picture of the cartoonist with Ralph Klein, a man he counts among his friends despite his frequent
and unyielding portraits of the premier as a red-nosed, gluttonous, often clued-out dictator. In one
drawing, Klein is seen stuffed into a toilet with the words "Speech from the throne" above him. In another,
following Klein's re-election in '86, he is "Ralph-bo," the beer-gutted, bare-chested victor smiling
arrogantly, Uzi in hand.
Rodewalt gets away with it because whether readers love or hate the public politician, the cartoons
resonate, without including anything that could be hurtful to the private man.
"I don't ever bring in anything personal from his life," says Rodewalt. "And he appreciates that."
So, where do Rodewalt's loyalties lie? Firby sums up the cartoonist as "a small 'c' conservative" who
occasionally "pushes the envelope in terms of taste, but in terms of his political statements, he's where
our readers are."
Rodewalt himself claims he's "pretty much anti-political."
That may be debatable, but his fondness for, or dislike of, certain politicians does seem to depend mainly
on whether or not they provide good fodder for a daily cartoon. Back in the day, says Rodewalt, former B.C.
premier Bill Vander Zalm was a favourite for his outrageous antics, including his stint as Human Resources
minister, which inspired Bob Bierman of the Victoria Times Colonist to create a cartoon of him pulling
wings off of flies.
Vander Zalm successfully sued the newspaper for defamatory libel, then lost on appeal.
"B.C.," starts Rodewalt, shaking his head disapprovingly. "I don't know if it's the grass or the mushrooms,
but I'll tell you what ...." His sentence trails off as the phone rings. It's a sales pitch; Rodewalt is polite but
firm. He hangs up, then says, "Turner"--as if the caller were the former prime minister himself, interrupting
Rodewalt's previous train of thought-"was hopelessly boring. He grabbed one woman by the butt and that
was his claim to fame."
Bronconnier? "Boring."
Duerr? "Really boring."
Tony Blair? "He seems kind of boring."
Trudeau? "I didn't like him. His arrogance drove me crazy. But he was great for cartooning."
Ditto for Bush, Thatcher and Chretien, whom Rodewalt especially loved drawing "for all kinds of reasons,"
he says, smiling.
Back in his jet-skiing days, Stockwell Day also held a special place in the artist's heart: "What a character
he was. To be honest," Rodewalt says, "we cartoonists are a really creative group but even we could
never have come up with the characters we satirize. Sometimes I think I should make out a cheque-not
much, maybe five bucks-to say, 'Thanks for making my job easy.'"
But there's nothing easy about editorial cartooning. It has to strike a balance between society's need for a
broad range of opinion and its need for cultural sensitivity. Will the next generation learn to strike this
delicate balance? Can we expect them-given the shrinking opportunities-to even think of taking up their
pens?
The question is on Menzies mind: "Where," he wonders, "is the next generation of Rodewalts?"
That all depends on our tolerance for the uncomfortable. If we can embrace the good, the bad and,
occasionally, the inappropriate, the young guns ought to be galloping up beside Rodewalt anytime now.
"I hit one in the butt once-he was sunning himself in the neighbour's yard," says the 58-year-old cartoonist,
scanning the ravine behind his Bowness house.
Once he's certain it's safe, he lets his corgi-Pomeranian cross, Tyke, out to play. Besides keeping his
cul-de-sac free of predators (or at least ensuring they have fresh breath), Rodewalt is awaiting his usual
9:55 a.m. call from Doug Firby, his editor at The Calgary Herald where he's worked for 22 years.
Today, though, it's already after ten and the call hasn't come. Rodewalt's getting frustrated. The first day
back after the holidays, the newspaper's resident political cartoonist admits he filed his roughs a bit late
this morning and may have missed hearing back from Firby before the editor went into a long meeting.
"Five days a week I send him three sketches and then wait for his choice," explains Rodewalt.
He never knows which one Firby will approve for the next day's editorial page. Having to choose a
favourite himself, he says, would be "like being caught in my underwear and then being asked if it's my
favourite pair."
An odd simile coming from someone who seems totally un-selfconscious about his scribbles. In any case,
he prefers to make Firby "do his editor's job," and so he'll wait, possibly until after noon, to get started on
the final version, always due by 4 p.m. With his grey moustache, sticking-out hair and candid (if somewhat
gruff) manner, Rodewalt is a cartoonist version of W.O. Mitchell. He is also a thinker and an artist with
better thing to do than talk about his art. He obliges, though, because it's not often he has the opportunity
to vent about the slow death of his profession.
If one were to caricature Rodewalt the political cartoonist, one might depict him as a seasoned frontier
cavalryman-eagle eyes, broad belly, ironic grin-holding down the fort in a lonely outpost, watching the
world from a lookout platform with an extreme viewpoint. Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton
would be scurrying about beneath the lookout, trying to escape the cavalryman's bullets as they muddled
their way along the campaign trail.
John Larter, another Calgary cartoonist who claimed recently that "political correctness has turned
political cartoonists into wienies," would be in the background, roasting on a stick over an open fire.
As for the "Indians" which every archetypal frontier scenario requires, well, we'll get to them later.
The sight of Canada's current prime minister dodging bullets might offend a few dyed-in-the-wool patriots,
but then again, if satire isn't offending somebody, it's not doing its job. Anyway, Rodewalt-one of an
increasingly rare breed of mavericks willing to put forth an unpopular critical opinion-likely wouldn't care
what anyone thought. Which may be exactly what makes him so valuable.
Rodewalt lives in a big, storybook house beside a railroad track with his former
Canadian-champion-ice-dancer wife, Susan Carscallen, and their two teenage sons. He started life on a
ranch near Edmonton, where his father was a horse dealer.
"I remember he named one of the racehorses Vance's Rocket," he says with a laugh. "It was fun and, like
most ranch kids, I was pretty weird. When we moved to Edmonton, I couldn't get over the idea of
sidewalks-to me they were like these little roads."
Once he got the hang of city life, however, Rodewalt never looked back. In his autobiographical notes in
The National Cartoonists Society Album 2005-a kind of who's-who yearbook of the cartooning
universe-Rodewalt writes of his rural upbringing: "I was bit and kicked, and shoveled out way too many
stinky stalls." Once he left home, he says, without a hint of regret in his voice, "that was it for ranches and
horses. It's a hard life and if there's no love involved, it doesn't work."
Instead, Rodewalt fell for cartooning and spent his teens haunting magazine and newspaper stands "until
they threw me out and I'd go find a new one."
He sold his first gag cartoon at age 14, to Community Life magazine in Edmonton. After graduating from
high school, he worked drawing ad cartoons for a publication called The Roughneck where, when he quit
in 1969, he put in a good word for his friend John Larter (the aforementioned wienie).
It was in '69 that Rodewalt sold his first editorial cartoon, to the Edmonton Journal. "I think it had to do with
jaywalking," says Rodewalt, who was soon scooped up by the Calgary Albertan.
During his 10-year stint there, Rodewalt made trips to L.A., where he was taken on as a freelancer by
CYCLEtoons and Hot Rod cartoons.
"I was pretty confident in those days," he says of his 25-year-old self. "I went to New York to check out the
scene and started at the top, which, back then, was Mad Magazine."
It was a gutsy move and one that paid off: for five years, Rodewalt worked as a freelance illustrator for
Mad, Cracked, Parody and Crazy magazines, drawing satirical cartoons relating to TV and movies.
When the Albertan was replaced by the Calgary Sun in 1980, Rodewalt stayed on for a couple more years
until one of his cartoons paved the way for a career at the rival paper.
"It was the Herald's 100th birthday," Rodewalt explains, "and I drew a cartoon for the Sun showing a spunky
young kid in a baseball cap saying to an old codger on a bench, 'Happy Birthday, Uncle Herald.' "
The publisher of the Herald at that time was the late Patrick O'Callaghan, and he liked the illustration so
much he asked a friend at the Sun to find out what Rodewalt would charge for the original. "I said it would
cost him lunch," says Rodewalt. "I'm not entirely stupid. I heard opportunity knocking and I answered."
Though the Herald already employed a full-time staff cartoonist named Tom Innes, O'Callaghan took
Rodewalt to lunch at the Petroleum Club and hired him three weeks later-but only after successfully
convincing Rodewalt that Innes, an old friend, would also stay on.
"It was awkward," says Rodewalt of his first months at the Herald. "It was so obvious that they were
pushing him out and pulling me in."
Innes continued cartooning for the editorial page until he retired in 1986, while Rodewalt illustrated the
newly created comment section. These days such an embarrassment of cartoon riches at a local
newspaper is virtually unheard of. Most North American papers no longer carry one, let alone two, full-time
political cartoonists. And, as the old guard retires or-as was the case last year for one bright star in the
cartooning galaxy, Michael Ramirez of the Los Angeles Times-is forced out, they are not being replaced.
"Ramirez is a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist and he's looking for a job," says Rodewalt, shaking his head.
It's a similar situation in Canada: Merle Tingley at the London Free Press retired in 1986 and was not
replaced; when well-known artist Cam Cardow left the Saskatoon Star Phoenix a few years back, nobody
new was brought in. Larter faced an even harsher fate when he was first fired from his job as cartoonist
for the Calgary Sun four years ago and then asked "to come back at half the income. They wanted me to
beg for the life preserver," he says. "I swam away."
Indeed, newspapers have been letting their resident cartoonists swim away in startling numbers: two
decades ago, American newspapers employed 200 cartoonists; now, there are 80. Canadian artists have
fared a little better, relatively speaking, with that number dropping from 32 in 1993 to 27 currently-though
many cartoonists worry that Canadian publishers will follow the U.S.'s lead. The oldest tradition in western
newspapers-and one that consistently pulls in the highest marks in reader surveys-is in grave danger of
going out with the tide.
The most frequent explanation for the endangerment of the political cartoonist is decreased newspaper
circulation due to the accessibility of electronic media, which has forced editors to cut budgets. The
employee who spends his or her day (incidentally, only one Canadian paper, the Ottawa Sun, employs a
female cartoonist) caricaturing politicians-potentially inciting angry letters from readers who might in turn
cancel their valuable subscriptions-is the first to go. These changing conditions have made syndication a
more viable option: instead of paying a staff cartoonist $300 for a drawing, newspapers can access work by
a dozen or more cartoonists from all over the world at $35 a pop.
It's an option, Firby says, "that threatens the great cartoonists like Vance."
But Rodewalt, surprisingly, comes to the defense of the trend by calling syndicates good, cheap resources
for small-town papers that can't afford to hire a cartoonist.
"Editors and bean counters have to look at their budgets and ask, 'Why pay a resident cartoonist's wage
when we could pay so much less for a syndicate?' " he says. When it comes to big-city papers, however, he
condemns those that choose a syndicate over a local artist as lethal to the integrity of journalism. "They're
sacrificing the local angle," he complains.
Guy Badeaux, cartoonist for Ottawa's Le Droit and editor of Portfoolio: The Year's Best Canadian Editorial
Cartoons, agrees, adding, "the papers are letting their cartoonists die of attrition because they claim they
have fewer problems when there's no local content. And, unfortunately, people don't seem to notice,
nobody complains. It's depressing."
Rodewalt himself often caricatures national or global events, but he says, "I approach it with a local angle
by, say, drawing a couple of old cowboys talking about it in a bar."
Such a colourful, Calgary-specific mise-en-scene would not be generic enough for a syndicated cartoon
which has to satisfy a broad range of audiences. Although it's the immediate, close-to-the-nerve relevance
that gives an editorial cartoon both its humour and its sting for readers of local papers, that's precisely
what's being lost when an editor runs a syndicated cartoon. But Rodewalt suggests that, rather than just
being the 'oh, well' result of money-saving measures, the move to syndication reflects a cultural shift. He
offers a more controversial explanation for the decline of the political cartoonist; namely that controversy
itself is under attack.
The rise of political correctness, which, says Rodewalt, "kind of snuck in the back door a few years ago," is
perceived by many cartoonists,including Rodewalt, as a problem. "Everybody is so terrified of offending
someone that a distortion like a cartoon is suspected of being a dangerous thing."
This pressure to produce increasingly bland cartoons, says Rodewalt, is exactly what he and his
colleagues will get together to "talk and drink non-stop about" at a cartoonists' convention in Denver this
spring. "Opinion," he laments, "outrageous opinion, is under attack. It's being watered down and that's
hurting editorial cartooning."
Despite the challenges facing his profession, Rodewalt says his hand has never been forced. "I always
seem to fit," he says, extricating himself from the colourful mess at his kitchen table to make a third pot of
bitterly strong Cowboy Coffee. Perhaps his adaptability can be explained by the fact that, "as critical as I am
of politicians, I've never claimed to have the answer." Such a claim, he believes, "is exactly the trap the
people I criticize have fallen into."
Herald publisher, Peter Menzies, calls Rodewalt's cartoons "magnificent, especially in an age when there's
so much political correctness. To be able to make sport of the rich and powerful, to be a satirist, is really
cool."
But when does making sport become unsportsmanlike? Consider a controversial Rodewalt cartoon that
ran in the Herald just before the '88 Olympics (it's reproduced on this week's Table of Contents on Page 3).
"There was no vicious intent," says Rodewalt. "Maybe I had a little more personal involvement because my
wife was in the Olympics, but anyway, the Indians had some gripes that I don't recall now and they wanted
to make a point by blockading the road. The athlete in the cartoon has lowered the torch like a lance and
runs through the blockade. In the last frame, the Indians are kind of singed and torched, their feathers are
burnt and one's saying to another, 'You got any other bright ideas?' " (In the caricature of Rodewalt
imagined earlier, this particular First Nations group might be depicted shooting flaming arrows at the
artist.) Rodewalt claims he was shocked by the flood of angry phone calls, letters and cancelled
subscriptions that resulted when the cartoon ran in the Herald.
"It was called racist and all kinds of other things. I just thought it was funny. Problem was, it showed the
Indians in a losing situation," he says, then adds, half-annoyed, half-bewildered, "That's the other thing-you
have to say Natives now, not Indians."
"Vance doesn't always realize when something might be offensive," says Firby when reminded of the
offending cartoon. "He's not a politically correct guy. I don't know too many cartoonists who are. But some
of the best cartoons are politically offensive. And there's a certain naivete to Vance that I love."
Larter, who, starting mid-January, will be added to the Herald's roster as a freelancer on Rodewalt's days
off, believes whether you call it naivete or nerve, cartoonists have lost their-well, let's let him nail it. "I
got started right around Watergate," he says, "at a time when everybody had balls. And we need that even
more today than we did back then."
Having said that, Larter also believes there's a place for political correctness in cartooning. While at its
worst, the movement shrinks the range of opinion to a suffocatingly narrow band, at its best it protects
those who would suffer unfairly from unchecked ridicule. As Rodewalt himself admits,"The best cartoons
are those that are easy to understand quickly and that inflict pain only on the politician."
Larter agrees: "If (a cartoon) is litigious or unfair or hurtful to the wrong people, I don't want to have been
the one to have drawn it," he says, adding, "You don't want to turn into cream-of-wheat cereal, but I think if
we use tact, common sense and wisdom, we can say what we want and it'll hold up." If cartoonists are
careful, says Larter-and he believes Rodewalt takes care-they can still effectively do what they do best;
that is, "nail the politicians."
Proof Rodewalt walks that line like a pro, is a photo stuck casually to a cupboard door in his kitchen. It's a
chummy picture of the cartoonist with Ralph Klein, a man he counts among his friends despite his frequent
and unyielding portraits of the premier as a red-nosed, gluttonous, often clued-out dictator. In one
drawing, Klein is seen stuffed into a toilet with the words "Speech from the throne" above him. In another,
following Klein's re-election in '86, he is "Ralph-bo," the beer-gutted, bare-chested victor smiling
arrogantly, Uzi in hand.
Rodewalt gets away with it because whether readers love or hate the public politician, the cartoons
resonate, without including anything that could be hurtful to the private man.
"I don't ever bring in anything personal from his life," says Rodewalt. "And he appreciates that."
So, where do Rodewalt's loyalties lie? Firby sums up the cartoonist as "a small 'c' conservative" who
occasionally "pushes the envelope in terms of taste, but in terms of his political statements, he's where
our readers are."
Rodewalt himself claims he's "pretty much anti-political."
That may be debatable, but his fondness for, or dislike of, certain politicians does seem to depend mainly
on whether or not they provide good fodder for a daily cartoon. Back in the day, says Rodewalt, former B.C.
premier Bill Vander Zalm was a favourite for his outrageous antics, including his stint as Human Resources
minister, which inspired Bob Bierman of the Victoria Times Colonist to create a cartoon of him pulling
wings off of flies.
Vander Zalm successfully sued the newspaper for defamatory libel, then lost on appeal.
"B.C.," starts Rodewalt, shaking his head disapprovingly. "I don't know if it's the grass or the mushrooms,
but I'll tell you what ...." His sentence trails off as the phone rings. It's a sales pitch; Rodewalt is polite but
firm. He hangs up, then says, "Turner"--as if the caller were the former prime minister himself, interrupting
Rodewalt's previous train of thought-"was hopelessly boring. He grabbed one woman by the butt and that
was his claim to fame."
Bronconnier? "Boring."
Duerr? "Really boring."
Tony Blair? "He seems kind of boring."
Trudeau? "I didn't like him. His arrogance drove me crazy. But he was great for cartooning."
Ditto for Bush, Thatcher and Chretien, whom Rodewalt especially loved drawing "for all kinds of reasons,"
he says, smiling.
Back in his jet-skiing days, Stockwell Day also held a special place in the artist's heart: "What a character
he was. To be honest," Rodewalt says, "we cartoonists are a really creative group but even we could
never have come up with the characters we satirize. Sometimes I think I should make out a cheque-not
much, maybe five bucks-to say, 'Thanks for making my job easy.'"
But there's nothing easy about editorial cartooning. It has to strike a balance between society's need for a
broad range of opinion and its need for cultural sensitivity. Will the next generation learn to strike this
delicate balance? Can we expect them-given the shrinking opportunities-to even think of taking up their
pens?
The question is on Menzies mind: "Where," he wonders, "is the next generation of Rodewalts?"
That all depends on our tolerance for the uncomfortable. If we can embrace the good, the bad and,
occasionally, the inappropriate, the young guns ought to be galloping up beside Rodewalt anytime now.
| Just Winging It: You never know where the Herald's editorial cartoonist will take aim next. And that's only part of what makes Vance Rodewalt tick Jacquie Moore -- SWERVE magazine January 13, 2006 |
