I never figured out in advance what I wanted to do after I retired from teaching. Teaching is a career that you can end. Art is not something that you retire from. I’ve always viewed art as a compulsion, not a career. I was lucky to be paid to do something that I had to do. Dad (a professional symphonic musician) would primly say “Amateurs do it for love, Professionals do it for money”. But he would have performed for nothing, and did, after he retired. He had to. Music was his life. He cried when he was no longer able to play his beloved English horn and oboe, six months before he died. The spirit was there, but the lungs were not. The instruments and reedmaking supplies (and a priceless series of slides on how to make the reeds) were donated to a local college’s music program while he was still alive. It wasn’t a gift of objects, but of his very soul.
Many people take up the arts after they retire. What do artists do? Our life’s work is what other people consider ‘hobbies’. Art, for artists, is a way of surviving. Creating something is a far better way to deal with life’s problems than the use or support of various substances, blunt objects, or noxious political notions.
So, artists, and that includes cartoonists, never really retire. We just keep on keeping on. I don’t know a single ‘retired’ artist who isn’t still creating something.
Which brings me back to the earlier problem of what I am supposed to do with my time. My hobbies include travel, cultural activities, and socializing. All of which got a little grey around the edges during the last two years. It’s by no means easy to travel now. Most people return with unwelcome souvenirs. I got my dose of BA5 in July 2022 and was told by my doctor that, under no circumstances, was I to get it again.
So I took the cartoons that I drew during the first two years of the pandemic and published them as a book, How I Finally Got To Live A Cat’s Life. Click the underlined text to see some of the reviews, and reviewers. It sold as well as a pork chop at a bar mitzvah. Despite its title, it’s not really about cats. It described life under lockdown and reads like a dispatch from Atlantis only three months after its publication. People’s attitudes have changed so much. Unfortunately my immune system has not, and I still follow doctor’s orders. I’m staying in and drawing cartoons this winter.
But what sort of cartoons?
Animation takes too much work and my last film was as well received as the book was…that is to say, it did not play in a single animation festival, only a few ‘film festivals’, and was understood by relatively few people. It plays better now than it did in 2017 since Canada and the USA are finally admitting the reality of the tragedies at the residential schools. I think it’s the most important film I’ve ever made (click the underlined text to view it) but what the hell do I know.
So what I thought was my life’s work has pretty much come to an end. I’d only be interested in directing, and that ain’t happening.
I tried panel cartoons. The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest wasn’t buying. And panel cartoons are the hardest material to think up. I did a few good ones, then the ideas stopped coming. I am a character animator so I think in character.
Political cartoons, my first love as a kid, now make me sick to my stomach. I don’t see how the pros can look at the wretched refuse that now passes for political discussion and keep their breakfasts, lunches and dinners down. Here’s an old one that I did of then-mayor-of-Toronto Rob Ford in 2010. Unlike more recent ones I drew during the 2020 Presidential campaign and the unpleasantness after January 6, I had no real anger when doing it. I saw the man in person and just thought that he looked like an angry potato.
I did comic book pages years ago. It’s not something I want to do now, and anyway, the Cat’s Life book qualifies as my graphic novel.
So that leaves the only form of cartooning I’ve never tried.
It started fast, on Christmas Eve. This thing wants to be. Artists will know what I’m talking about.
It’s coming along well.
Watch this space in coming months.
I know, I know, this is a weak ending for the entry. I consider it a beginning.
And it keeps me off the winter streets.