THE BIG ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CARICATURE

Country / City: Canada

  • Wright Douglas Austin

    Cartoonist
    Douglas Austin Wright  was a Canadian cartoonist, best known for his weekly comic strip Doug Wright’s Family (1949–1980; also known as Nipper). The Doug Wright Awards are named after him to honour excellence in Canadian cartooning.
    After emigrating to Canada in 1938, Wright worked as an illustrator at an insurance company before serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War Two. It was here that his cartoons of fellow servicemen first drew the eye of a magazine editor. After freelancing in Montreal for a few years after the war, Wright took over Juniper Junction in 1948 after its creator, Jimmy Frise, died suddenly. Within a year, Wright launched a wordless and untitled gag strip about a little boy for the Montreal Standard (called The Weekend magazine after 1951). Eventually entitled Nipper, the strip switched to The Canadian, another national weekly newspaper supplement, in 1967 and the name was changed to Doug Wright’s Family. Wright suffered a stroke in March 1980, and had another stroke on January 3, 1983. He died the next day in hospital at the age of 65.
    Nipper was a wordless masterpiece, capturing suburban Canadian life with wit and a keen eye, and ran uninterrupted for more than three decades. Wright also drew several other strips, including Max & Mini, Cynthia and The Wheels, and a series of editorial cartoons which were collected during the seventies.
    Wright moved from Montreal to Burlington, Ontario in 1966.
    He was married to Phyllis Sanford, and had three sons: William (1953-2020), James and Kenneth.
    In 2005, the Doug Wright Awards, named in Wright’s honour, recognizing Canadian cartoonists and graphic novelists, were founded. Wright himself was amongst the inaugural inductees into the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame (also known as Giants of the North).
    In Spring 2009, Drawn & Quarterly Books published the first volume of a retrospective of Wright’s life and career. Designed and compiled by Guelph, Ontario-based cartoonist Seth, the project (Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist) contains a biographical essay on Wright, and is the first book-length study of the prolific artist. They also published strip reprints of Nipper, starting in 2011. Three volumes have been published covering 1963–1964, 1965–1966 and 1967-1968.
    Reference: Wikipedia, 2010

  • Simpkins James Nathaniel

    1920

    Cartoonist, illustrator

    Canadian cartoonist born around 1920. James Simpkins grew up in Winnipeg. Manitoba. For several years he attended art school in Winnipeg, and during World War II he served in the Canadian army. On release in 1945, he began doing artwork for the Beaver (the Hudson’s Ray Company magazine) and the National Film Board of Canada. As a staff artist for the NFB for 16 years, he produced filmstrips for school use, and after leaving their regular staff, he continued to freelance for them. Simpkins’s work also includes gag cartooning and book illustration. In 1933 he submitted a design for a hockey stamp that was used by the Canadian Post Office Department. In the last ten years, Simpkins has had cartoons appearing regularly in the Medical Past anti has also done some advertising work. Simpkins’s most familiar creation is Jasper the Bear. Starting in 1948, Jasper appeared regularly in Maclean’s Magazine for over 24 years. Peter Newman, in an introduction to one of the published collections of Jasper cartoons, calls the bear ‘‘the Quintessential Canadian: using his wits (because he has few other weapons) . . . muddling through the most difficult situations with a kind, self-deprecating good humour that manages to salvage his self-respect, if little else.” Jasper finds himself in a variety of situations involving people who come holidaying into his environment. Occasionally, outside events dramatically penetrate Jasper’s world, as when the trans-Canada pipeline was built through his cave or when Jasper, looking down on people constructing a Bomarc missile base, commented to his woodland friends, “I wish we could do something before they become extinct.”

    Jasper has been used by the Boy Scouts and has appeared on greeting cards and on bear warning posters in parks. He is also well represented in Jasper Park. Alberta, where his effigy is used in many ways. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Jasper was a Sunday comic strip distributed by Canada Wide Features. Currently, it is a panel syndicated by CLP Features to weekly newspapers across Canada. Most Canadians are familiar with Jasper the Bear. As Simpkins once said, “I thought I had created a new cartoon character. Now I know I was trapped by a bear.”

    The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 1981