Cartoonist Graham Pilsworth looks over one of his editorial cartoons in a recent issue of The Coast. Photo: Trevor Murphy

Graham Pilsworth remembers marching onto the big Toronto buses by himself with confidence as a child. When a bus pulled up it made a whooshing sound as it stopped. The doors opened inches in front of his nose. He remembers stepping inside taking poised strides down the aisle, passing everyone else already in the bus and settling into a seat near the back. Pilsworth always sat in the back. He liked to observe the characters who filled the seats in front of him, like a woman holding a baby gently in her arms, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of the moving bus or an elderly man in the very first seat waiting patiently for his stop.

Pilsworth can't remember precise examples of the character he loved looking at. It's been about 50 years. One might have been a man in a suit and tie sat reading the newspaper. On the seat beside him sat a black leather briefcase, occupying the whole seat. It sat there defiantly, unwilling to move when a woman with a bag full of groceries stepped onto the bus and made her way down the aisle. The man in the suit sat like a stone as the woman had to stand.

In the blink of an eye, Pilsworth would see the man for what he really was. He was no longer the suited man with a newspaper and a briefcase. Now he was an atrocious hyena, laughing and cackling amidst the bus full of people. Graham Pilsworth had just turned him into a cartoon.   

 "It's fairness and justice that direct life," says Pilsworth. "If that's missing then that's what gets me furious, and that's what I bore in on. You have to look for what's really there."  

For nearly 40 years, Pilsworth has made a career of looking beyond the surface in order to draw cartoons that readers will find both humourous and meaningful. He has done work for publications such as the Vancouver Province, the Toronto Star, Report on Business Magazine, Saturday Night Magazine and Halifax's alternative weekly The Coast. Underneath it all, he says, there is an undertone of revenge against the people like that man on the bus, the people Pilsworth sees as the evil-doers of everyday life.

"Everyone needs something to keep them going," says Bruce Wark, a journalism professor at the University of King's College and a colleague of Pilsworth's at The Coast. "In Pilsworth's case, it's his politics and his anger."

Pilsworth began drawing cartoons when he was in high school at the Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, which he refers to as a "penal colony."  His cartooning stemmed from doodles in the margins of his school books. He drew cartoons in his Latin textbook, with jokes in Latin. His French teacher reprimanded him for sketching cartoons in class, even though the captions were penned with perfect French grammar. He was suspended from science class, even though he loved science, for drawing too many pictures of the animals and plants the class happened to be studying.

The budding cartoonist produced five issues of a comic book mocking the teachers who didn't like him before being sent on a "three-day holiday" by the school administration. It wouldn't be the last time he would butt heads with authority.   

Pilsworth's ability to see people as cartoons, however, has not always stemmed from distress or vengeance. As a child on the bus, he could easily transform a long lanky man with a receding chin and a prominent Adams apple into a stork. It was just a matter of imagination for him then, and still is today.

A recent cartoon done for The Coast is just one example of Pilsworth’s constant pot shots at big business. Photo: Trevor Murphy

Mulroney's chin

As a cartoonist Pilsworth is above all else a humorist, cracking jokes at every opportunity, and laughing at the stories he tells. "I always claimed, and still do, that I'm in this world for the fun," he says.

Patrick Corrigan, the editorial cartoonist for the Toronto Star, recalls Pilsworth's presence in the Toronto art scene during the 1970s and 1980s, calling him a "fixture" during that time. "He didn't pull rank or have a big ego," says Corrigan.

Pilsworth's humour and good nature are evident in his cartoons just as much as his passion and cynicism. A caricature of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney he drew for Report on Business Magazine, for example, included a chin so large it needed wheels at the end to support it.

Though his profession saw him drawing caricatures of politicians around the country, Pilsworth only lays claim to having met two that he has drawn. One was John Turner, the minister of justice in Pierre Trudeau's cabinet who later became Prime Minister for a little over two months in 1984. The other was "Flying" Phil Galardi, the minister of highways in B.C. during the 1960s. Pilsworth was working as the editorial cartoonist for the Vancouver Province at the time.

"Galardi was a little guy, built like a pit bull," says Pilsworth. "I had caricatured him a lot and he put his hand out to shake mine and pulled it away as soon as he found out who I was. And he said, 'It's not a pleasure meeting you.'  I said to him, 'I'm surprised meeting you too, because I thought you'd have a striped suit with a number across the chest.'"

Galardi took a swing at the cartoonist, but Pilsworth's friend Bob McConnell pulled him out of the way of "Flying" Phil's flying fist.

Pilsworth was no stranger to altercations when it came to his work. While freelancing for Report on Business Magazine, he began illustrating columns by the well-known political writer George Bain, whom he had previously worked for at the Toronto Star in the early 1970s. Pilsworth's approach to Bain's columns was to always take the opposite stance. One instance saw Bain writing in support of free trade, so Pilsworth drew a little beaver taking his toque off, getting ready for Uncle Sam to put him on the chopping block and cut his head off. Pilsworth says the editors at Report on Business Magazine loved it. Bain hated it.

Pilsworth was constantly pushing boundaries in his freelance work for business magazines. He would draw businessmen as tyrants, as thieves, as pirates or bullies. "They were all heroes in the business community and I was always drawing them without pants," he says. But they kept him around, he says, because he was good and they needed someone who was fast and who would make their articles look good.

David Shaw, a Toronto book designer and illustrator, used to play in a band called Don Vallee and the Parkways with Pilsworth and Corrigan in the 1980s. He recalls Pilsworth's anti-big business stance that came through in his work, calling it "confrontational stuff." "He would draw a fat cat playing tennis with a money racquet and things like that," says Shaw.

Pilsworth still takes pot shots at big business. One of his latest cartoons printed in The Coast (where he has been an editorial cartoonist for the past six years), sees a fat businessman with slicked back hair and a cigar between his fingertips riding on the back of Terry Fox. The drawing accompanies a column about corporations profiting from cancer research.

Ever the humourist, Pilsworth cracks jokes at every opportunity. Photo: Trevor Murphy

Working with Duncan Macpherson

Pilsworth began to hone his personal and political views while working for the Vancouver Province from 1968 to 1970. He looked up to editorial cartoonists like the Toronto Star's Duncan Macpherson - one of the best editorial cartoonists in the country and an artist Pilsworth describes as the "Eric Clapton of cartoons."

When the Province went on strike in 1970, Pilsworth was asked to work as a second cartoonist at the Star alongside Macpherson. At the time Macpherson was already known as a notorious drunk Pilsworth says, but his condition was getting worse, and the paper needed someone else to draw two or three cartoons a week. Pilsworth recalls times when Macpherson would lie on the floor of his office, staring at the ceiling, convincing himself to go down to the Press Club to start drinking again. In just two years at the Star, Pilsworth went from doing two cartoons a week to doing every editorial cartoon.

His style also draws influence from other cartoonists, including Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman. The characters in Pilsworth's cartoons are not there to provide a quick quip - a style prominent in many editorial cartoonists. They are actors with movement and animation.

"He uses the gesture of motion a lot and his drawings are very accurate and realistic," says Kyle Shaw, editor of The Coast. "He puts a little touch in everything that is a border that completes the drawing,"

While Pilsworth's pen strokes are delicate and defined, his cartoons tend to push conventional limits. Shaw is reminded of another Brian Mulroney caricature Pilsworth drew for Who's Really Who - an unpublished satire book about Canadian public figures - where the chin of the former prime minister spanned three pages.

"His style is really in an old school vein," says Kate O'Connor, the art director of The Coast. "He has the slapstick caricature down pat."

Graham Pilsworth himself looks like a cartoon. "He has one of those cartoonists' faces," says Stephanie Domet, a producer for CBC Radio's Definitely Not the Opera and former managing editor of The Coast. "He's an odd duck."

His receding snow-white hair is the perfect companion for the scruffy moustache that sits atop his constantly smiling mouth. His face - like the rest of his body - is oval. His heavy-set weight, silver-rimmed glasses and boisterous laugh give him a familiar, friendly sense. He is jolly. He is Santa Claus. He wears a white T-shirt that is printed with a large black cartoon bird - perhaps Heckle, perhaps Jeckel - who is drinking a beer and wearing red polka dot shorts.  

He is a modern-day Renaissance man: well-read, broadly knowledgeable individual with new ideas and talent. He is a big believer in the power of human potential. He would like to see free university in Nova Scotia so its home-grown resources could be used to change the province. He is an ardent supporter of alternative energy sources, and wants to see more libraries being built, instead of condominiums.  He's a playwright, a musician, a painter, an author, and most recently a writer for The Coast.  

But it is his cartoons that best carry his passions and anger. Cartoons themselves, he says, are stronger than any other medium in print because of their simplicity. They're like applejack - a highly intoxicating cider that is distilled of all its water leaving you with pure, hard booze that will send you around Uranus and back.

"That's what cartooning is," he says. "It's really getting down to the pure elixir."

tjmurphy@dal.ca