Five Twisted Years: British Columbia-What Really Happened

Dennis Blake is a high-school history teacher with the Halton Board of
Education.

This collection of Raeside’s editorial cartoons is a marvelous
retrospective on the past six or seven years of British Columbia’s
political culture. It chronicles with great energy the predictable and
the unpredictable foibles, the hubris, and the absurdity of the human
(political) condition. Raeside fills his cartoon canvases with bold
black-and-white swaths, with just a flavor of the mid-1960s underground
cartooning style. The result is the creation of a Raeside British
Columbia. His beautiful B.C. is populated by the mythological creatures
of a political culture, which fight apocalyptic battles involving not
good versus evil but rather the right versus the left of the political
spectrum. Cartoons emphatically detailing the graft and corruption of
morally weak politicians are interspersed with subtle polemics on such
topics as the state of the environment. For every laugh and groan
induced by Raeside’s work, the reader can witness a mute cartoon
testimonial that enrages in its poignancy.

Raeside, a widely syndicated, veteran cartoonist for the Victoria
Times-Colonist, has recently expanded his esthetic reach into the
associated field of animation. In the Raeside editorial cartoon, history
is writ large (and usually with appropriately grotesque lettering). All
his work can be recommended, especially Five Twisted Years, his first
collection of editorial cartoons in more than half a decade.