SPECIAL Father’s Day Bun Toons! YAY!

It’s Father’s Day, dear internet, so we’re getting you a Ty.

click on any of the images in this Bun Toon Special Edition to make them larger.  It’s worth it, trust me.

Unlike my neighbour (Clone Subject #905), I was born biologically, and had a father.  His name was Charles, and I’ve mentioned him a few times on this blog; Chuck was a well-known Canadian celebrity, with a varied and interesting life.

And he sometimes looked like this, during his occasional “moustache” periods.

But before Dad was a Talk Show host, and before he was a best-selling novelist, or a famous inventor, or a network news director, or a Hollywood screen writer, or a politician, or an evangelical minister, he was a cartoonist.

The bulk of his work was published in the mid-thirties, when my father was barely in his twenties, doing sports cartoons for the Toronto Globe (not the Toronto paper the Daily Planet is based on, by the way…that was the Toronto Daily Star, a newspaper my father was eventually the City Editor of).

The original art to the Globe’s sports cartoon on the day Canada won a silver  medal at the 1936 Olympics.  Sports cartoons were as common as political cartoons in the newspapers of that era, and most major dailies had an exclusive sports cartoonist or two as well as a couple of political guys.

These originals are much smaller than you’d expect.  Most of them are about seven inches tall and about five inches wide.   You could fit two across a regular sheet of printer paper.  The one at the top of this Bun Toon is larger because it was for a weekend paper.

When I was a kid, in the 1960s, my father would give me drawing lessons.  He started teaching me proportion, and how to draw the human head from different angles, or the shape of a horse’s leg, or how to hold a pencil when doing “professional” lettering.  This started when I was five or six years old, DECADES after my father had long stopped drawing professionally. The box that contained his old cartoons was tucked away in the basement, forgotten examples of a skill he’d long abandoned using.

I inherited that box full of cartoon originals when my father passed away a few years ago.  I framed a couple and put some on my wall, and put the rest back in the box and left them in the crawlspace of my house. At first I didn’t think anyone would care about them but my family –  But it’s come to dawn on me that they’re probably some of the last newspaper cartoon originals from that era in Canada, and they should be scanned and shown off, just for the historical interest in this lost corner of Canada’s Cartooning Past.

Thanks for letting me present a sampling of my father’s cartoons, on Cartoon Father’s Day.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your BONUS Chuck Templeton cartooning moments:

Dad did political and editorial cartooning as well, though far less of that survives.  It’s hard to imagine there was a time that Hitler was the subject of political cartoons.

For my American readers:  the campaign referenced here was the campaign to re-elect our Prime Minister at the time:  William Lyon MacKenzie King, seated in the reviewing stand behind the wounded “soldier”.

Speaking of political cartoons, when my father was a politician (he ran for Premier of Ontario and lost.  A Premier is the Canadian equivalent of an American Governor), he amassed a sizeable collection of original political cartoons featuring himself as the subject, drawn in the 1960s by a who’s who of Canadian political cartoonists of that time, including art by Macpherson, Ben Wicks, and others.  I think I’ll save those for a future Bun Toons entry.  Who knew I had half the history of Canadian Cartooning sitting in my basement?

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For last week’s Bun Toon (featuring Alan Moore, and drawn by ME instead of my dad) click here.

For every Bun Toon ever (over 98% of them drawn by me!) click here!

Nepotism Thursday! Apples, Trees and Original Sin!

It’s my son’s 14^th Birthday today, so naturally it’s time for another “NEPOTISM THURSDAY!” (which falls on a Wednesday this month,  quite common, I assure you).  But because the kid’s going to get lots of expensive gadgets and free food later, I’m going to talk instead about the cartooning work of my father, Charles “Chuck” Templeton, and how far apples fall from trees.  So THERE, beloved son!

Just a quick tease this time out, with a couple of Dad’s sports pieces, scanned from the original art that hangs on my wall and from clippings…Chuck had a  regular cartoon gig for the  Toronto Globe and Mail in the 30s (*actually, when Charles was 17.  By 21, he started his career as an evangelist.  kts),  for about four or five years in what was Dad’s early twenties.  He drew mostly sports,  and some political cartoons with both a remarkable skill for likeness, and a playful skill for comedy.

I had no real sense of my father’s illustrating and cartooning work until after he died.  And though he taught me one or two things about proportion and how to hold a pencil when I was very young, it was nothing like professional secrets or anything.  And since his work was all printed and packed away decades before I was born, I saw almost none of it, until it was entrusted to me when he passed away.

So, what that amazed me most about his work once I got to see a lot of a it at once, is that I see many similar things to my own style in there.  Similar compositional methods, similar lettering even, and the basic skills are in the same zone, though in different styles for different generations.

Considering how little he taught me about the biz, and how little of his work I saw growing up, how freaking odd that there are so many similarities.  My parents were divorced, and I was raised by my mother, so it’s not a question of nurture…  Is there a GENETIC component to an artist’s aesthetic?

YEESH?!?

More of my father’s work to come in future weeks.  I’ve got stacks of it, and much of it is very good.  PLUS, it’s a nice slice of history for the Canadian Comics Corner buffs out there…including Mr. Pincombe.  As for me, I’m off to teach my comic book bootcamp course tonight, and maybe buy my teenaged son a slice of cake, and sing.

NEXT:  How I turned down sitting on an upcoming panel with Stan Lee and Harvey Pekar next week, (I’m an idiot), and the stirrings of JOHNNY CANUCK!  Oh, so exciting!

Ty the Guy!