The Doug Wright Collection (C-)This is one of those times where I feel like the kid in the story, 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. You know, the one who tactfully points out that the king, is in fact, naked. In this case, the naked king is the hardcover, 240 page collection of the work of Doug Wright, Canada's Master Cartoonist. I've read all this praise and over-heated tributes to the guy, and well... I just don't see it.Yeah, he's a good draughtsman, but I get the impression that for Doug Wright, cartooning involved being an artist first... and telling, you know, gags was like, well, not on the top five things one does in one's pursuit of a career as a cartoonist. The gags, such as they are, are so pedestrian that if you look through the entire run of his career doing 'Nipper' and 'Doug Wright's Family', one single motif pops up through the whole 31 year run of the strip: 1) Doug's kids engage in typical kid behavior. (playing hockey, roughhousing, exploring the neighbourhood.) 2) Being kids, their activities lead them into getting their clothes dirty or torn, getting scrapes on their knees or elbows, or mildly damaging property. and 3) receiving a glower of embarrassment from their mom, or a glower of rage from Dad. And that's it! That's thirty-one years of Doug Wright's career as a cartoonist in three sentences. The level of humour on display here is on par with 'Reader's Digest', 'Family Circus', and 'Fred Basset'. (Oh, who am I kidding. I like to imagine Doug Wright looking at Family Circus and snarling, red-faced, 'THAT'S CRAZY!! WHERE DOES THAT BILL KEANE SONOFABITCH GET OFF? I MEAN, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS INVISIBLE GHOSTS NAMED, 'NOTME'! THAT'S NUTS! IS HE TRYING TO WRITE A SCIENCE FICTION STRIP? AND THAT FRED BASSET! EVERYONE KNOWS DOGS DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH!! ARE THEY HIPPIES SMOKING REEFER? HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD?! BOYS, COME HERE AND LET ME YELL AT YOU SOME MORE!! GNAAAARRRGH!) Face it, Bill Keane is S. Clay Wilson next to Doug Wright.
I realize I'm being hard on poor Doug Wright here, so let me backpedal a bit. His drawing is top-notch, and it's nice to see such a body of work collected about a uniquely Canadian cartoonist. (The kids play a lot of hockey, instead of, you know, baseball, and there's references to particularly Canadian institutions, like Imperial Oil, fr' instance.) My animosity in this case is leveled more at the marketing geniuses at Drawn and Quarterly, the book's publisher. The byline reads, 'Canada's Master Cartoonist.', and my first thought is, 'Since when?' I'd put Aislin, Lynn Johnston, Chester Brown, John Byrne, Hal Foster, Kate Beaton, Seth (one of the editors of this tome, by the way), and even Dave Sim among a lot of others way up ahead of poor old Wright.
In trying to inflate a journeyman cartoonist up to legendary proportions, Seth and Brad MacKay don't do him any favours in the long run. In the highly likely event sales for this book don't merit a second volume, I really hope Seth doesn't go into some kind of public funk over 'Canadians apathy over a criminally overlooked national treasure." once that happens.
