George Feyer was stuffing feathers into quilts for $18 a week in 1949 when he sold his cartoon in Canada. It was, by all accounts, a rather subdued gag about a man being fitted for glasses. It was only after its publication that the editors were informed by other immigrants that Feyer’s cartoon contained a [...]

Composer George Daugherty gets a little “Looney,” so to speak. Illustration by Matthew Daley/Torontoist. “It is so sad,” Elaine Benes once bemoaned. “All your knowledge of high culture comes from Bugs Bunny cartoons.” Like any of the more memorable Seinfeld quotes, it was a pithy observation that rang true, speaking to whole generations who can [...]

Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Image from Les Callan Normandy and On (Longmans, Green and Co., 1945). During the Second World War, comic books offered Canadian youth escapism from the humdrum of the home-front. The earliest [...]

Glad Hand is Torontoist’s political cartoon, created by Brett Lamb and appearing here every Friday.

Culture Club is Torontoist’s Canadian pop culture column. We’ll be waxing philosophical about the trivial, the titillating, and the mundane on a bi-weekly basis. Robert Mankoff and Margaret Wente talk ‘toons. “Have you ever heard of the Internet meme, ‘Christ, what an asshole‘?” asked Torontoist illustrator Brian McLachlan, standing in the aisle of the ROM’s [...]

Pages of John Kricfalusi’s letter, which appears in full on Letters of Note. Ambition, for the fledgling among us, can be equal parts talent and hero worship. For many, the first step on the road to success is an unsolicited email, or maybe a phone call—the infamous Starbucks pitch—timidly soft-selling the hard-wrought results of your [...]

At left, Gary Clement’s National Post cartoon from Friday. At right, a CBC TV crew spotted on Canwest death watch outside the Post‘s Don Mills HQ the same day. It’s like a joke. Or maybe a parable. One media outlet characterized (fairly or unfairly) as left wing and one media outlet characterized (fairly or unfairly) [...]

At right is the cover of The New Yorker‘s July 21 edition. It depicts, as Huffington Post’s Rachel Sklar summarized, Barack and Michelle Obama enacting “every smeary right-wing stereotype imaginable: …[Barack] Obama in a turban and robes fist-bumping his be-afro’d wife, dressed in the military fatigues of a revolutionary and packing a machine gun and [...]

This, today’s Globe and Mail editorial cartoon. The cartoon was published out of context below the Letters to the Editor in today’s Globe. But it’s very likely a reference to this news story (about which the Globe published a story in a sidebar on Saturday, but nothing in today’s paper). Just like the math on [...]