The Decibel - The complicated art of political cartoons, with Brian Gable

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Nearly every day, The Globe published an editorial cartoon. Around 8,000 of those cartoons were drawn by Brian Gable. After 35 years of drawing cartoons for The Globe, Brian Gable has retired.Today, we talk to Brian about the complicated art of political cartoons, how he does it, who his favourite people have been to draw, and why he thinks we need editorial cartoons in today’s world.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Today, we're talking about editorial cartoons. Because almost every day, the Globe and Mail publishes one. Sometimes they're funny, sometimes they're serious, but they always try to make a point. And more than 8,000 of those cartoons were drawn by Brian Gable. After 35 years of drawing for the Globe, after receiving the Order of Canada and getting his own Canada Post stamp, Brian Gable has retired. This week on The Decibel, we're bringing you the lighter, quirkier, or fun stories from the Globe this year. So today, I'm talking to Brian about the complicated art of political cartoons

and why he feels they're still so important in today's world. Brian, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It's my pleasure. So you've really dedicated your career to this field of editorial cartoons. So what do you like about this, Brian? What do you like about editorial cartoons? First of all, I like the workplace because it's on a page where ideas are being tossed around, sometimes in a friendly manner and sometimes aggressively. Ideas about absolutely everything, you know, the letters, the editorials, the

editorial cartoon, the op-ed page. It's just a fun place to work because people are grinding out issues of the day. And to be in the middle of that and to toss one or two of my own ideas into that mix has always been fun. I've always enjoyed doing that. And you're doing a very different thing, or you were doing a very different thing than the rest of the newsroom is, right? A lot of people, especially at the Globe and Mail, right, you're writing. People are writing about the news. So what can an editorial cartoon do maybe that, you know, a piece of writing can't? One thing it does is it condenses an idea into a, you can consume it really quickly. If it's a good cartoon and if it's working, probably three to four seconds.

And, you know, there's nothing scientific in that, but if you think about it, you know, you turn the page, there's a drawing, you look at it, you either laugh or you disagree or whatever, but it doesn't take a long time. Plus, an image tends to go right straight into your brain, to your frontal lobes, much faster than the processing required for reading. Consequently, if it's a good cartoon, the impact can be pretty strong. And that's very exciting.

It's very exciting to be part of that process. So you've been doing this for decades, but take me back to the beginning. How did you actually get started in this? Well, as a kid, I liked to draw. It was something that I did solely for pleasure, and I didn't do it with any marked degree of brilliance. People wouldn't stop and go, whoa, that guy's got talent. I just scribbled. I just doodled.

At school, instead of paying attention to my lessons, I doodled. High school, university, and one day in an English class, a student sitting beside me, it was the beginning of the term, September, looked over at my book. And then he said, I just signed up for the student paper. And our last meeting they said they're looking for a cartoonist. I never thought about cartooning even though that's kind of how it all began, just really pretty randomly. And they seemed to go largely okay. People laughed at them and they kind of got them. And then I became addicted. Okay, so you started doing this in university, but then you turned this into a career. So I'm curious how you actually do this, Brian, like how you're actually making these cartoons.

So you're sitting down in the morning, you know you've got to draw something. What's the process for making that cartoon? The process goes right back to when I was four years old, and it's just thinking visually. It's doodling on a piece of paper or using a digital stylus. First of all, having a coffee in the morning, maybe listening to the news and the radio, reading headlines, flipping through the paper, and then just kind of, you know,

mulching it up in your brain and with no idea about what you're going to be doing. And then I just doodle. And then, and this is kind of the weird part of the process. And this is where people go, I still don't get it. Like, how do you do this? Because there comes a point after sometimes 10 minutes of doodling, sometimes an hour and a half of doodling, where you see in the corner of the page, there's an image, you know, it could be a dog running or something, and suddenly a metaphor pops into your brain. And then you start to carve away, almost like a sculptor, I guess. You chip away at it, and you try to form it into a cogent idea. And then for editorial cartooning, you try to stir in a little bit of satire or humor, if you can, if the situation allows for it. Some don't.

Those are hard, and you can't do those every day, but humor is a central part for it. Some don't. Those are hard. And you can't do those every day. But humor is a central part of it. And I've always enjoyed humor from my earliest days. And I think on some good days, I've been able to actually use humor. So yeah, okay, well, let's let's talk through an example. Because this is kind of, you know, we're talking about it abstractly here. But let me, let me actually bring up a cartoon that you did this past summer. So this one, it's a line of burly, intense-looking army guys. They're all standing in a line. The commander there has a NATO badge on.

And then in the middle of this line of intense army guys, there is a cardboard cutout. And it's got a bright yellow smiley face and a red maple leaf on its chest. So this sounds like that would be Canada. Brian, what's the idea behind this one? New stories were suggesting that Canada was shirking in its share. 2% is the ostensible goal that we were supposed to be contributing out of our budget. And we're coming well short of that. Right. And that 2%, that's the responsibility of NATO members. They're supposed to contribute 2% of their GDP to defense spending.

Yeah. So I had the image of kind of a military review where all of the NATO soldiers are standing. They're three-dimensional. I think I didn't even show their heads, did I? You didn't. Yeah, just their bodies. You can see their bodies. You can't see their eyes. Yeah, exactly. So their helmet's kind of covering most of their face. So it's like a military review. They're saluting the officer who's walking by. And then the one figure, Canada, is really just a two-dimensional cutout that's kind of propped up and in contrast to the other three-dimensional people who really are actually, you know, pulling their weight. So really, Brian, as a cartoonist, you're thinking about stories visually.

So you're reading headlines, you're listening to the news, but then you're thinking about kind of a visual representation of something. So maybe I can just put a quick challenge to you here. We talked about some examples, but maybe we can do a little spitballing while you're here in the studio. We've been talking just in general in Canada a lot about affordability the last few months, right? How groceries are really hard to afford, housing, it's hard for people to get by, right?

So I know you've done some cartoons on this issue before, but if you had to sit down and spitball some ideas, draw out some ideas here, what would you do? Where would you start? So you try to avoid, I try to avoid cliches, but I start with cliches and then see where they go. So I'd probably start with a cashier, maybe a grocery store aisle, like clean up in all three, that kind of thing. So maybe somebody's holding a Kleenex box and they're crying and someone's running with a mop because they're looking at the prices. So there would be shopping carts in my doodles. There would be children riding in the shopping carts.

I would just lay down as many images about shopping, about sustenance, about nutrition, and hopefully that little magical thing would happen, and I'd come up with something a little bit more creative than the ones I just outlined. But you're really, so you have kind of an idea like this idea of grocery prices is really central to the affordability issue, right? So you took us to the grocery store right away. You knew that was kind of the crux of it. You know, in a cartoon like that, you try to bring the reader in and you want to make it visceral. You want to make it have a feeling for people when they look at it.

When I first started out, it was painful because it didn't come quickly. I didn't have a system. I had to really drag an idea out, kicking and screaming, and wrestle it down. And I've done, in my time, innumerable third-rate cartoons. It's just part of the process. But you start to learn. So in my last couple of years, actually, as a cartoonist, I have to say it was palpably, noticeably, tangibly easier. I could tell that my mind was relaxed.

And that's part of the creative process is actually not being stiff and uptight. And I imagine one thing you're always considering, too, is the tone of your drawings as well, right? Because you're usually talking about the news, and the news is often quite serious, right? So how do you balance that with the nature of cartoons, which is typically often more lighthearted? Yeah, that's a good question. And it's actually central to the way I think I've always approached editorial cartooning. The word serious, yes, yes, yes. News headlines every day are almost inevitably profoundly serious.

But what isn't serious is the human response to those. Human beings are an interesting species and they're fallible. And I think that's always been at the heart of my work, which is to say that, you know, cynicism is sometimes a healthy approach in humor. Politicians sometimes genuinely say silly things. And to report that is fun. It's fun to point out the

inconsistencies or the frankly sometimes idiocy or transparently shallow response that politicians can come up with or that voters can come up with, but humor is central in pointing out the fallibility of people. You know, 9-11, when that happened, I did some cartoons, you know, saluting the firefighters and things like that. But my favorite cartoon surrounding that particular news story was when George Bush read a list of all the countries that he wanted to thank for supporting the United States. It seemed to go on for half an hour. And he forgot to mention Canada, which, you know, the previous few days in Gander, we had all of the airplanes, you know, a musical was written. Come from a ways based, yeah. Yes, precisely. It was a big deal, and we weren't mentioned.

So I had Uncle Sam, or you could assume it was meant to be a stand-in for George Bush, with a list that went on and on and on and on and on. I actually wrote out all these various, the Tijuana City Council, the Lima-Peru Lions Club. He just was reading this endless list, and standing behind him was a little Canadian flag was a Canadian beaver thinking to itself, any minute now, getting ready to wave the flag. We're going to be mentioned. It's going to happen. So even in the midst of tragedy and chaos and gloom, there was an element of just, again, human nature

coming out in that. We wanted to be mentioned. So my instinct is always to try to find some aspect that can be considered amusing, even sometimes in a situation where you wouldn't immediately expect to find something like that. We'll be back after this message. Okay, so Brian, we've talked about how you do this, how this works. So now I've got some quick questions just about the course of your career, if you're up for this, things that you've drawn. I just want to know, what is your most famous comic? So when you meet people and they hear, oh, you're Brian Gable, what is the one that people remember you for? That's kind of ironic, but I think I did a cartoon on Canada Day sometime around 2015. And in the cartoon, I had the standard Canadian beaver

wearing his white shirt with the maple leaf. And he's sitting in Canada, we call it a Muskoka chair, you know, Adirondack chair. And he's just kind of sitting there with a beer and he's waving his little flag and wearing sunglasses. It's July. It's just relaxed. And people responded to that drawing. I hadn't expected that there would be a response like there was in the sense that they felt, I think, it kind of portrayed just something about Canada, you know, kind of a relaxed, welcoming, chill, not overly intense kind of person or personality. And it ended up actually on a stamp, a Canadian postage stamp, right?

So it really, you know, people, a lot of people found something in that image. I do want to ask you about your favorite person to draw, though, because you've drawn a lot of politicians over your career as well. Is there, you know, the person that was the most fun for you to draw? Well, I did enjoy drawing Justin. We are, of course, talking about Justin Trudeau, I imagine. Yes, yeah, rather than Bieber. Generally speaking, if someone is classically good looking, they're very hard to caricature. But there was

something about Justin Trudeau that was fun to draw because he is a little bit self-regarding, at least that's what I've picked up. The background and drama and everything comes through in his presentation to the public. And it was fun. The colored socks, the visit to India where he was dressing up in a costume and everything. It was just fun portraying someone who seemed to stumble a lot in public presentation. It was kind of a gift for cartoonists. So, you know, Brian Mulrooney was fun, you know.

The chin became a signature. You just really had to draw a chin and everyone knew exactly who you were talking about. Stephen Harper, that wonderful stiffness that he brought. Just anytime someone's become entrenched in the public imagination, it's fun to play with that kind of imagery. Well, it's interesting because you obviously do draw a lot of politicians, Brian, right? And so you're often in a position to where you're poking a little bit of fun or, you know, calling them out on something that they've done. So I guess I wonder, how do you make sure that your cartoons aren't partisan, right? That you're staying balanced? You know, there's satire and

then there's propaganda. And I try to mix it. I try not to dwell. There are people, there are cartoonists, there are writers who every day, it's just repeating the same bang, bang, bang, anti this, anti that, or pro this, pro that. And if you don't change, if you don't look at issues, if you don't have the capacity to respond to shifting news headlines, it turns into propaganda. And nothing is more boring than propaganda. There's no arguing, there's no nuance, there's no subtlety. And it's, frankly, it's the death of humor. So you think about kind of, I guess, poking fun at both sides of an issue or both sides of the spectrum. Yeah, pulling out the human fallibility in the middle of all of the screaming and yelling. You know, that's kind of what it's all about.

How do you feel now looking back at cartoons from your early career when you're actually at this stage of your life now and looking back on the work that you did there? What does it make you feel? It reminds me that civilizational values change, evolve, and shift. And things that were funny when I was starting out in my career, looking back on it now, there's a sense of gravity around some of those issues that I missed at the time. And I'm sure 20 years from now, if I look at the work that I was doing in my last year here at the Globe, you'll go, oh, I think I would like to change that a little bit because my response to that has changed over time. So that's important to understand. Yeah. It must be kind of interesting. I'm just thinking to like have that record to look back and see kind of, I don't know, like an archive of your opinions essentially over the years.

Yeah. Yeah. If ever late at night I'm having trouble going to sleep, I look at all my opinions on all the issues over the last decades. You know, occasionally they're insightful and sometimes they're astonishingly droll and boring. Of course, you are making editorial comments when you're drawing these cartoons, right? You're referring to something that's going on. There's a bit of responsibility with that, I would imagine, right? Because there have been controversies with political cartoons as well in the past, right? Yeah. So how do you think about that? How do you, I guess,

walk that line? When I sign a cartoon, one of the first conditions for myself is I have to be able to defend what I've said to myself. Then, you know, if it's a very contentious cartoon, a lawyer will look at it. You know, I mean, that's part of the process, not obviously daily, but every once in a while people will go, I think we better lawyer this. If we end up in court, this better be defensible. And if you're going to make a point, it better be defensible. You better have a clear point that you can say,

well, look, here's the story. This is what happened. And this is what the cartoon is saying. And it supports that. Yeah. Just lastly here, Brian, of course, the media landscape has changed a lot in the past few decades. And I guess I wonder how you think about this. Like, why do we still need political cartoons? Like, what role do you think they play in today's world? It's kind of that old image of democracy in the Greek marketplace, the agora, right? Where people would stand in a circle and yell at each other, but they were talking, they were arguing, they were using logic instead of weapons. And maybe that's what I like about the editorial page. And I think it's partly the laughter with cartoons that, if they're not propaganda, but if they're satire, it's a reminder that we're human beings. We make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are funny. Sometimes they're tragic.

But we can talk about it. And that's central to a functioning civilization. I've been thinking about, you know, what's down the road for this profession. And the media landscape is evolving at such a rate that it's almost impossible to keep up. Part of that landscape I'm finding, I was finding in my last years, is that nuance and subtlety are kind of harder to work with. And we seem to be polarizing as a society, right? So it's harder, I think, to sneak in humor in that kind of milieu than it has been in the past. And so I wish my successors in this business all the very best, because I think it's increasingly challenging.

Brian, it was wonderful to get to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here today. It was a real pleasure. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wells. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.