Drawing Bones: My 15 Years of Cartooning Brian Mulroney

John Wright is Documents Librarian at Queen’s University.

Brian Mulroney and Terry Mosher (Aislin) started their careers together
in the same city (Quebec) and at the same time (the late 1960s). At that
time Mosher was not yet “Aislin” and Mulroney was known by his
nickname, “Bones.” Their careers have advanced in lock step ever
since.

Using this link in Drawing Bones, Aislin takes his special fascination
with Mulroney and explains how he thinks up and then creates political
cartoons. He tells how and why certain ideas occur to him. He
demonstrates the techniques he uses to bring the ideas to a polished
completion, and he describes the role the editor plays once he (Aislin)
has submitted the finished product. Aislin attempts more than just a
technical description of cartooning: he tries to put into words what it
is about Mulroney that brings out the best (or worst) in him as a
cartoonist.

Aislin holds Mulroney and his Cabinet colleagues responsible for
shaking the “decent foundations” of a more caring society that
previous Canadians have handed down to us, and for selling Canada out to
the greed of Reaganomics and Reagan’s America. But the text fails to
give us what the caricatures reveal—Aislin’s personal feelings in
combination with a devastating skewering of Mulroney’s perceived
foibles of vanity, greed, and mendaciousness. His growing disgust with
the man is evident in the increasingly savage work he produced over the
15-year period. The cartoons devolve in tone from the first work,
showing Mulroney as a handsome clown-prince—a Redford
“wannabe”—to the more recent depictions of a gangster, a pimp, and
a White House lawn jockey. Aislin’s bitter reactions to Meech Lake,
the Free Trade Agreement, and the scandal-ridden Tories of the 1980s
dominate this book’s atmosphere as well as a number of its pages.

One may not agree with Aislin’s opinions, but the value of his work,
as represented in this book, is undeniable. It is an intelligent,
thoughtful—but not self-important—attempt by a caricaturist to
explain what he does and why.