Chins and Needles: Political Cartoons

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

What could be by its very nature more ephemeral than political satire? The current joke, scuttlebutt, or scandal, that is the all-consuming subject of interest today, or this week, or even this month, will almost certainly be a “whazzat?” after a few pages of the calendar have been turned.

This being so, some of the wickedly pointed satire of Andy Donato’s scathing cartoons will be lost on those historians of the future who will some distant day leaf through the pages of his work in an attempt to recapture the lost “mood of the moment.” It is fair to guess that the sketch of Canada Post as a dollar-gobbling dinosaur will still draw a chuckle? One may hope that the staring face of Ernst Zundel, his mouth sealed shut with a swastika of adhesive tape, will be so mysterious as to require explanation. Some faces, notably those of Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark, will probably be at least hazily familiar. As for the rest ... who can say? One fairly certain bet: political cartoonists of the future will place Donato’s acid-etched cartoons of whatever year on a level with the finest, sharpest and most painfully, pointedly funny of their kind.