There Goes the Neighbourhood: An Irreverent History of Canada

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

Raeside, a widely syndicated cartoonist and animator who works as an
editorial cartoonist for the Victoria Times-Colonist, has left his mark
on West Coast political culture. In this book he attempts to draw on his
talents and experience to create a humorous history of Canada that
combines narrative and editorial cartoons.

The work fails on two counts. The bantering tone of the narrative is
best suited for captions rather than for a sustained text; the technique
is frankly fatiguing. In addition, one might argue that by using
contemporary cultural allusions to bring humor to historical events, the
author has done a disservice to the history.

This is also one of the underlying reasons why Raeside’s editorial
cartoons are flat and conceptually unremarkable. While his drawing
technique is (as always) superb, his humor is too broad, forced, and
one-dimensional to work in the context of the editorial cartoon.
Editorial cartoons should appeal subtly to the viewer’s understanding
of his or her own political culture. They should use a visual language
of expression that becomes more opaque the further away from the
inspiring event the viewer becomes. When the political culture framed in
the cartoon is of historical and not personal experience, the
complexities of expression are, for the most part, lost to the viewer.
Because Raeside is unable to reintroduce these complexities in a way
meaningful to modern audiences, he relies on some very tired clichés to
make the historical issues graphically relatable. Having—perhaps
unwittingly—attempted a project of immense intellectual undertaking,
Raeside has not triumphed.