One Oar in the Water: The Nasty '90s Continued in Cartoons by Aislin

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Aislin is the pen name of political cartoonist Terry Mosher. Although
the Montreal Gazette is Mosher’s home paper, his syndicated cartoons
are familiar to Canadians across the country. Mosher has won numerous
prizes for his work, including two national newspaper awards, and in
1985 he was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame. This, his 26th
published collection of cartoons, spans the period from 1995’s Quebec
referendum to the 1997 federal election.

Mosher’s work is blunt. In this collection, Jean Chrétien sports a
pair of donkey ears, an Orange Day celebrant is depicted as an ape in a
bowler hat, and a thoughtless sea-doo rider is seen through the
crosshairs of a rifle scope. Most of Mosher’s doodles chronicle the
day-to-day outrages inflicted on the common working Canadian by
self-serving politicians, Quebec separatists, big banks, greedy
businesspeople, and smug bureaucrats.

Sometimes Aislin seems long on rage and short of ideas. For example,
the ape he uses to parody Orangemen reappears in two later cartoons that
satirize, respectively, U.S. paramilitary extremists and the Reform
Party. In addition, many of Mosher’s cartoons depend heavily on
written text, without which the joke simply would not register. Still,
26 consecutive books must mean that more than a few Canadians like
cartoons that make monkeys out of people and come with instructions on
why they should laugh.