Political Asylum: Cartoons and Caricatures

Penny E. Bryden teaches history at Mount Allison University in New
Brunswick.

This collection of political cartoons by Malcolm Mayes of The Edmonton
Journal brings together work published over the last several years. It
is thus not a reminder of the political climate of a particular year,
but will perhaps serve as a window on the popular attitudes of the
“new Canadian West.” Although Mayes includes sections of cartoon
commentary on both national and international events, which are most
trenchant when dealing with global ethnic tension and other provincial
political regimes, his main focus and his best material are reserved for
Alberta politics. It is this emphasis on the region, this relative
neglect of “national” politics, this shrewd caricaturing of the
people drawn from the daily experience of Westerners that have earned
him the loyal following he so obviously deserves. His style is
relatively spare and his artistic forte is clearly his ability to
accurately capture the physical images of the politicians and public
figures he lampoons. But his strength as a commentator, and therefore
the usefulness of this collection, rests in his ability to appeal to the
political sentiment of the western region, and most particularly its
sense of alienation from the national political process, without dulling
the cartoon brush when it is turned to such indigenous politicians as
Donald Getty, Ralph Klein, and Social Services Minister Mike Cardinel.
Mayes is a cartoonist with a regional audience who illuminates (and
illustrates) for the rest of Canada the basis of the western political
position.