While I get the appeal of comic books, it really wasn’t my thing as a kid for the most part.
My idea of fun late on a Saturday afternoon at the cottage at Lake Simcoe, near Beaverton, Ontario and down the road a small piece from Orillia and Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s somewhat fictional, somewhat true Mariposa setting for his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, was walking the beach road past the Talbot River and down to the blue Toronto Star “honour” coin box and buying the unbelievably fat Saturday Star.
While I generally didn’t find comic books appealing, I did like some newspaper cartoons, especially editorial page ones. During the week at home, when we read the Oshawa Times, I enjoyed reading the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon, the longest running cartoon in the world, published since 1918, when Robert Ripley himself was the cartoonist. I also liked Gordon Johnston’s single-panel It Happened in Canada. I have the scrapbooks with both pasted in still.
I think I might have liked former Lynn Lake, Manitoba cartoonist Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse, which she started drawing here in Northern Manitoba in 1979, but it didn’t come along until I was in my early 20s doing other things, so I didn’t really get into it too much. Although I managed to chuckle my way, come to think of it now, through quite a few of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons during the same period.
Centennial year was a grand year with the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, or simply Expo ’67. On Saturdays we were all Torontonians and Montréalers and citizens of a larger world for a day a week, reading the Saturday Star with its rotogravure colour-printed Star Weekly magazine insert in 1967, which had lots of comics indeed if that’s what interested you. My interests, however, ran more to the “Insight” section. The cartoons that really interested me were those drawn by the legendary Toronto Star editorial page cartoonist Duncan Macpherson. I’m not sure if that made me a precocious kid or political junkie. Maybe a bit of both.
Last year, after not paying too much attention to cartoons in recent years, I discovered David Wilkie, an Orlando, Florida-based advertising copywriter and artist who creates, with his wife, Katie, and via various media Coffee With Jesus under the banner of a company called Radio Free Babylon. Wilkie grew up Catholic, but is now an evangelical, with the former perhaps explaining that slight tone of cultural irreverence.
I sent a couple of panels on the Rapture and turning water into wine to my friend Pastor Al Bayne, who retired at the end of December as regional director for Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Northwestern Ontario for Alpha Ministries Canada. Alpha was started by Rev. Charles Marnham in 1973 at Holy Trinity Brompton Church, an evangelical Anglican church, in London, England to introduce – or re-introduce – people to Christianity.
“Father Al,” as I sometimes jokingly call him, happens to be a former Catholic (he was a parishioner at St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and is also the retired pastor of St. Pierre Bible Fellowship in St-Pierre-Jolys. “I looked at several of the cartoons – not sure what I think of them – some I found very funny,” Bayne wrote back in an e-mail. “Certainly would be very controversial in evangelical circles – definitely irreverent, but thought provoking. Like they say in their disclaimer, they are not for everyone.”
With that caution in mind, you can check out Coffee With Jesus for yourself, should you feel so inclined, at: http://www.radiofreebabylon.com/Comics/CoffeeWithJesus.php
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