In 2004, journalist Brad Mackay and I founded the Doug Wright Awards for English language cartooning in Canada. We created the awards to bring attention to Canadian cartoonists working outside the traditional areas of cartoon publishing ( namely minicomics, underground publishing, the graphic novel, etc.). We felt there were already plenty of awards out there celebrating newspaper strips and mainstream superhero material. There were even a few devoted to the kind of work we wanted to honour – but, American awards of course. We wanted to shine a Canadian light on the underground/alternative comics scene here in our own country. We also wanted to use these awards as a method to bring attention back to the handful of great cartoonists from Canada’s past. Names that were slipping into complete obscurity. This turned out to be the first step in a campaign to bring Mr. Wright his proper due. Ultimately it led to the publication this year of the first of a two-volume biography/art monograph published by Drawn and Quarterly of Montreal: The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist.
Our first awards ceremony was a modest affair in the upstairs of a dusty Toronto bar. In the five years since we’ve come a long way. This year’s awards were hosted by Actor/Director Don McKeller in the shiny new Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall and was a pretty slick affair for a comic book award. Still, let’s not get too swell-headed, what with the hand-to-mouth nature of these sort of ventures, we might very well be back in that dusty bar before too long!
What follows is the speech with which I opened that first awards ceremony.
When the idea of a new Canadian award for cartooning came along there were really only two names that immediately presented themselves as possible namesakes: Jimmie Frise and Doug Wright. I’m not entirely sure why Frise lost out. I don’t recall any debate on the matter. Hands down it was Wright. It’s just possible that Wright is more a part of our world than Frise. Frise was born in the nineteenth century and was dead by 1948. He is simply a more distant figure. Whatever the reasoning, it’s no slight to either man. They were both enormously talented. They were the twin pillars of Canada’s cartooning history before 1980.
Still, I’d venture a guess that neither name is overly familiar to many of you here tonight. Canada has a short memory for its own creative people. That’s why I’ve been asked to come up here and give some information about Doug Wright to those of you who may not know of him or his work.To prepare this talk I dug out all the material I had on Mr. Wright. Twenty years of painfully difficult collecting. It’s been an uphill battle to find his work. Nothing remains in print. Very few book collections were even printed to begin with. Each individual strip had to be found in magazines gleaned from yard sales and church basements and goodwills. Magazine dealers don’t carry many of these magazines. Nor do comic shops. Each strip found was a triumph. Anyhow, I looked through all this stuff. I even looked through a box of strips lent to me by Mr. Wright’s widow, Phyllis. It was there, in that box of fading newsprint that I came across a single yellowed sheet of typewritten copy. An artist’s bio, obviously typed out by Wright himself. Possibly to include with submissions. Or maybe to hand out to the press. Here’s what he wrote:
Doug Wright was born in England and arrived in Canada at the age of twenty-one with a sister and mother, who longed to see him become a doctor. Stationed at Rivers, Manitoba, during the war, he became a cartoonist by accident when fellow air force recruits began laughing at his doodlings.
A cartoon strip, ‘Doug Wright’s Family,’ based on doings in his own household and the neighbourhood and a cartoon depicting the average man’s preoccupation with potholes, taxes and other mundane problems, were published in Canada and syndicated all around the globe. One doesn’t find politicians and public figures in Wright’s work, but in the sense that this artist deals with the dilemma of people in a troubled society, he is ‘political.’
Like many successful cartoonists, doing both editorial and comic art, Doug Wright began as a “ghost,” helping the late Jimy Frise with the strip Juniper Junction, then stepped out to try several features of his own.
‘The thing about this profession is, it’s creative and rewarding,’ says Wright. ‘After all, in what other line, if a taxi driver cuts me off, could I get even with him in a drawing?’
Like most cartoonists, when forced to sit down and write about themselves and their work, Wright seems to have missed the point entirely. He didn’t get to the heart of it at all. He’s just trying to sound professional here. Businesslike. He even ends it with a joke like a good business speech. He brings up the political stuff to sound serious. If anything, he sounds a bit embarrassed. I even think he cribbed the middle part from John Muir’s introduction to Wright’s collection of Spectator cartoons. Even the typing looks pained with it’s careful borders and many whited-out errors. Doug left out all the poetry.
But, since Wright started with the dry stuff, I’ll start with the dry stuff.
Wright was born in 1917 in England. His father died in the war before Doug even met him. Doug came to Canada at the age of twenty-one to work as a commercial artist for the Sun Life Assurance Co. When the Second World War came along he joined the RCAF and that’s where he had his first cartoons published in a variety of little military magazines. The positive attention by those airmen changed his life. He was now a cartoonist. After the war he went to New York to try and break in but lucky for Canada they sent him back home to get some experience.
In 1949 he started a little strip about a toddler for the Montreal Standard Magazine. A contest named the kid “Nipper” – a name Wright never cared much for. In 1967 he switched magazines and changed the strip’s name to “Doug Wright’s Family.” Wright married Phyllis Sanford in 1952 and over the next eight years they had three children. Three boys who would supply him with all the raw material he would need to churn out a weekly strip for over thirty years.
Back in 1948 he had also taken over Jimmy Frise‘s strip “Juniper Junction” when Jimmy died. He drew this strip in the Family Herald magazine up until 1968 when the magazine folded. On top of these two strips he drew large single panel cartoons for the Montreal Star and later the Hamilton Spectator. And lots of illustrations too. Complicated illustrations with scores of figures and highly detailed backgrounds. He tried to syndicate two other strips during these years as well. That didn’t pan out. Still, besides “Doug Wright’s Family,” he managed to have a least one cartoon feature (sometimes more) running in the daily newspapers from 1966 to around 1972.
So you can see – Wright was a hard worker. A real professional. He slaved his life away in that studio as all real cartoonists do. A lot of time alone at the drawing table. A lot of time spent in your own head. But don’t let that be his whole epitaph. There is a lot about him that appears between the lines of that bio. I don’t know about the real stuff. I never knew the man himself. But I know the work and there is some poetry in the work.
From all I know about the man, Wright was humble and not given much to pretensions – so I’m sure he’d shudder at any mention of poetry in connection to his work. Still, for a comic strip without any words he did manage to get quite a bit of poetry in there. A kind of poem to suburbia or to the middle-class lifestyle.
Even though by the time I was reading the strip it was titled “Doug Wright’s Family,” it was never known as anything but “Nipper” in my house. I remember wondering why my mother called it this, but oddly, I never asked. I just took her word for it. His name was Nipper. Both the magazines the strip had appeared in were newspaper supplements. They came with the weekend paper. A huge section of the Canadian public read the strip. These magazines were predominantly middlebrow in content and were pretty reflective of Canadian culture of the time. They had articles on hockey players and the Queen, Madame Benoit’s recipes and lots of ads for curling sweaters and Kraft cheeses. Like all magazines of the time they liked to have a cartoon in the back to give the reader something to chuckle at. Something wholesome and family friendly. If they had picked anyone else to do it – someone less talented and dedicated than Wright – then the strip would probably have been forgettable. The fact that we are here tonight shows that something in the strip turned out to be memorable. A lot of people do fondly remember the strip. But, like Wright’s son Ken once said to me: “Forty is the dividing line. Over forty and they remember. Under forty and they don’t.”
There is some truth to that. However, even those over forty often misremember the strip. Often it is recalled as a sort of Canadian “Family Circus.” This irritates me. Wright’s work had none of the flavour of that south-of-the-border baby strip. In fact, his view of childhood was remarkably matter of fact. Downright unsentimental. Rather than showing childhood as precious he tended to focus on the petty conflicts between children. There was a lot of minor bullying in the strip. Nipper and his unnamed little brother were constantly at each other. Wright wasn’t looking back with rose-coloured glasses; he was looking outside his window for something real. This probably says a lot about Wright. It certainly shows he never would have made it as an American gag-a-day newspaper cartoonist.
It was a pantomime strip, told only with pictures. This is a fact that people often forget. That’s a real testament to his story telling skills. The strips were so well executed that you didn’t notice the lack of words. The most recognizable feature of the comic was the two distinctive bald heads of the boys. In the 1950s Wright had designed their round heads to emulate the buzz-cuts that were popular at the time. However, by the 1970s the boys stood out oddly among their longhaired friends. Younger readers always asked: “Why are those kids bald?” I’ve read that Wright would have liked to have updated his boys – to give them long 70’s hair – but he knew that his readers would be perplexed by the change. Thank goodness, he resisted. Now they can be assured of entry in that pantheon of inexplicably bald cartoon children: the Yellow Kid, Henry, Barnaby, Sluggo, and of course, good ol’ Charlie Brown.
For the first few years of the strip, Wright’s drawing was rather minimalist – primarily focused on the figures. Backgrounds in the strip were sparse, often nonexistent. However by the late ’50s his work had flourished. His interest turned to those backgrounds and now they were richly detailed. This love of detail was always there in his illustrations yet strangely, not so much in his cartoons. It was in this late ’50s period that his amazing abilities as a draftsman came to the fore. He often spent an entire day working out the complex settings for his cartoons in the Montreal Star and, later, the Hamilton Spectator. This attention to detail eventually found it’s way into the comic strips. I guess he couldn’t help it – he clearly loved that kind of drawing and couldn’t resist pouring that enthusiasm into the comic. The panels became masterfully crafted examples of deep space and careful observation. In one memorable panel he drew a large complicated vista of a strip mall, the parking lot, the street behind the parking lot and finally the hills beyond – all of which perfectly captured the essence of just such a mid-twentieth-century location. Looking at this drawing is practically the same as visiting the place. As his backgrounds grew in complexity so did their “sense of exactness.” The environment of the strip was, undoubtedly, his own house, his own neighbourhood and his own town. Wright was drawing the very world that I grew up in – the south-western Ontario of the sixties and seventies. Every carefully rendered detail is perfectly familiar to me: the ranch-style homes, the school yards, the corner stores – even the little things like the screen doors.
Wright’s cartoons are like a catalogue of the period: the clothes, the hairstyles, the furnishings, the streets, and especially the cars. Wright obviously loved cars. He lavished special care in the drawing of them. He rendered them with both utter authenticity and a kind of vital inner life. They jumped off the page. Every kind of vehicle was lovingly drawn. Go-karts, race cars, station wagons, muscle cars, fire engines – even the garbage trucks. The boys themselves were always tooling around in their famous hot-rod pedal cars. A lot of the cartoonists of the mid-twentieth century were fascinated by the machines of progress, but usually this manifested itself in a love of airplanes. Wright is the only one I know who picked the automobile. It’s no surprise that when Wright took over Frise’s “Juniper Junction” the focus of the strip rapidly narrowed from that of the various residents of the little town to just that of the town’s garage and it’s mechanics.
Earlier I used the term “sense of exactness” to describe Wright’s drawings. That sense was never more acute than in his drawings of the post-war suburban environment. They evoke the very experience of being there. I can think of nothing else, not even photographs, that brings that world of my childhood back to me with such deeply felt longing. As I peer into his strips I see the essence of an era that no longer exists. The last breath of the early twentieth century mixing with the new world that is to come.
On occasion, Wright would focus his great rendering skills on a small poetic moment of everyday life such as a snowy winter morning or a dusky evening of fireworks or a sudden sun shower. These images never drew undue attention to themselves. They never slowed the strips down. Still, if you stopped and took the time to take them in you would feel their subtle beauty. This brings up another of Wright’s gifts – his wonderful ability to draw weather. He’s one of the very few cartoonists who can actually make you feel the temperature drop a few degrees in a comic strip. His sensitivity to weather and the seasons was as integral to his work as his famous interest in detail.
Sometimes it seems as if the comic was as much about place and atmosphere as it was about the family. But, of course, the family was the actual content of the strips. On the surface “Doug Wright’s Family” seems to be a series of domestic gags but it doesn’t seem right to label his work a gag-strip because he never seems to have really aimed for the big laugh. It was more observational, more slice of life. Wright’s work played the chords of familiarity. He let you in on the small events that you would recognize from your own family life.
Don’t get me wrong, the strip was humourous, but it was a quiet humour. I mean, it certainly started out as a typical gag-strip, aiming for the usual laughs. For the first ten years of the strip I think you could fairly place it in the same category as Hank Ketcham’s “Dennis the Menace.” But it outgrew that material. By 1960 Wright had begun to focus on what I call “the small incident.” His weekly strip would feature the boys involved in some minor, usually mundane, everyday situation. Fighting over the TV channel or giving their guinea pig a ride on a skateboard. The event was small and the payoff was usually nothing more than a chuckle or a smile for the reader. It certainly wasn’t about the belly laugh. Each of these little situations, hundreds of them over the years, was played perfectly deadpan. It was a simple record of the duties, quibbles, irritations and pleasures of family life.
Once a year the magazine would give him an entire page of full colour for a Christmas strip. Even these strips were never sentimental. They tended to stress the petty greed of childhood. Or perhaps social embarrassment. Or other less typical Christmas themes. For someone like myself, who tends toward sentimentality, I have always been impressed by Wright’s ability to steer clear of this minefield – especially in a kid-focused strip. I have heard it said that having children of your own puts an end to any ideas of romanticized childhood.
As the ’60s and ’70s passed Wright watched the societal changes with a bemused attitude. Even though ostensibly he was the father in the strip, Wright the artist always seemed to be an observer – uninvolved, detached. He never seemed genuinely bothered by the changes in society – if anything he continued to find humour in them. He delighted in gently mocking the youth culture of the times. Especially in his big single panels for the Hamilton Spectator or his “Max & Mini” cartoons. In his comic strip the work became more and more focused on tiny events. The amusement of blowing up a balloon or of getting stuck in a tree. Whether the cat should be in or out of the house.
In the very late seventies his work began to dry up. He began to recycle old jokes that he’d used way back in the fifties. Sadly, these were drawn with less vigor and skill and they compare badly with the earlier ones. I had wondered about this decline when I first studied those cartoons, but I ‘ve since learned that he suffered a small stroke around this time. Being a cartoonist myself, I can understand that imposing dread of the work looming. There is always some deadline coming down the pipeline – ideas needed now. He must have felt his abilities slipping away from him. His great drawing powers weakening.
And the drawings are weaker at the very end. I think I can imagine some of that disappointment he must have felt, sitting in that studio. That man who had so prided himself on his amazing creative abilities. And so the strip came to an end in 1980. Wright retired it. I can only guess at his thoughts and feelings on the matter. He’d drawn it for thirty-two years. As always, truth is stranger than fiction. On the day that the last strip appeared in print, Doug Wright had the big stroke that closed off that amazing drawing ability forever. Wright was dead within three years.
And since then, like so many artists who worked in the popular press, his name has grown more dim with the passing of time. He’s in danger of being forgotten. That’s what brings us here tonight. Yes – these awards were created to honour the cartoonists of today but I’m hoping that The Wright Award will help to bring men like Doug Wright back into our consciousness again. Artists like Jimmy Frise, Walter Ball, James Simpkins, Albert Chartier, Peter Whalley, George Feyer. These men were the hard working cartoonists of Canada’s past. They stayed in Canada and published in the magazines and newspapers of their time. Canada’s publishing industry was small and they had to struggle to make a living but they were hard workers and their work changed the pop-culture landscape of our country. They were part of a generation that defined a newer machine-age Canadian identity.
I know these men never thought of themselves collectively. They were each individual commercial artists working alone. They probably didn’t think of themselves as cartoonists with a big “C.” If anything they probably identified with the newspapermen, art directors and publishers they worked with. Still, I’d like to bring them into the fold – to welcome them in after their long years in the wilderness. I’m hoping that Doug Wright would’ve been happy to see that, all these years later, his work lives on and that young artists, who weren’t even born during his lifetime, will know his name.
Tags: Issue 77
[...] 1. Seth on Doug Wright. The best writing on comics tends to come from cartoonists themselves: Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud, Chris Ware, Eddie Campbell. There are few other art forms in which the critical discourse is so totally dominated by practitioners. Seth belongs to this elite company of cartoonists/critics. His writing on cartoonists like John Stanley and Chris Reynolds is filled with sharp observations grounded in a rare in-depth knowledge of comics history. The latest issue of CNQ reprints Seth’s speech on Doug Wright, delivered 5 years ago to launch the Doug Wright Awards. It can be found here. [...]