Cartoon, published on 20 May 2017.
Graeme MacKay is an award-winning Canadian political cartoonist, known for his decades-long association as an editorial cartoonist with The Hamilton Spectator. As a college student, he drew the comic strip 'Alas & Alack' (1989-1991) for The Fulcrum, while later on his gag-a-day comic 'Gridlock' (1999-2003) ran in the Hamilton Spectactor.
Early life
Graeme Patrick MacKay was born in 1968 in Dundas, Ontario. He had an early interest in drawing, enjoying cartoons in the Hamilton Spectator and other Toronto-based newspapers. As a teenager, he developed an interest in politics. At age 17, MacKay followed in his older brother's footsteps and worked part-time in the meat department at Miracle Food Mart. He used the money to finance his studies of history and political science at the University of Ottawa, while creating cartoons for the weekly university magazine The Fulcrum, of which he became the graphics editor. Among his graphic influences are William Hogarth, James Gillray, Blaine, Duncan MacPherson, Ed Franklin, Mad Magazine (Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragonés) and especially Roy Peterson, the longtime editorial cartoonist for The Vancouver Sun.
1990 Alas & Alack episode, depicting Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as a king.
Alas & Alack
Together with writer Paul Nichols, Graeme MacKay created the comic strip 'Alas & Alack', which ran in The Fulcrum between September 1989 and April 1991. Set in an anachronistic version of the Middle Ages, the comic depicted late 1980s politicians as kings, knights and squires. Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was "king of Canadaland", for instance. Foreign heads of state, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and Saddam Hussein were recurring characters. While starting off as a medieval parody, the cartoon eventually became more rooted in the present day, except for the politicians still wearing medieval royal robes. Looking back on his early work, MacKay felt it was unavoidably amateurish, given the young age of both creators. Most of the comedy relied heavily on words and jokes that sometimes were quite offensive, such as naming Minister of the Status of Women Barbara McDougall "Lady Barb, Ye Minister of Shrews and Wenches". On his personal website, MacKay said that these kind of jokes were "(...) an indication of how permissive the readers were in the pre-PC period of the student press. Even worse, it serves as an indication of how perhaps nobody bothered to read my cartoon. I don't remember any complaints, after all."
Cartoon of 12 April 2001 in comic strip format, parodying the TV series 'Fantasy Island'.
Cartooning career
After graduation, Graeme MacKay went on a two-year working tour through Europe and North Africa. In 1994, he had a job as a counter clerk in the food halls of Harrods in Knightsbridge, staying there for 18 months. After returning to Canada, his began selling his cartoons and illustrations to titles like the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, the Chicago Tribune, the Canadian Forum, and Policy Options, a publication of the Institute for Research on Public Policy. Using the pseudonym "Ham", he had his locally oriented editorial cartoons published in the Ancaster News and other local community newspapers from the Hamilton, Ontario, region. Of two years of doing freelance work, MacKay was hired as a full-time political cartoonist by The Hamilton Spectator on 7 July 1997. In addition, his work for this paper has been syndicated further throughout Canada and in some parts of the United States by the Arizans Entertainment Syndicate in Edmonton.
'Gridlock', with a cameo by Pope John Paul II.
Gridlock
While publishing editorial cartoons in the Hamilton Spectator, MacKay and columnist Wade Hemsworth additionally created the comic strip 'Gridlock' (3 July 1999-January2003), about the goings-on at the Hammercab taxi company. Hammercab's chief was Eddie Wight, AKA Whitey, a man with conservative views, who had already spent 30 years of driving for the bigger companies in the Hamilton-Burlington area. Whitey's cynical and sarcastic daughter Bev also works for the company, as is his reluctant son Edward, who would rather be performing on stage. Another Hammercab drivers is the turban-wearing Sammy Singh, whose positive and outgoing personality quickly tears down the barriers with those with prejudice against new Canadians. The fifth and final employee is Chew, who is of Asian descent. Most episodes show the staff chauffeuring passengers around, while having funny discussions. Originally the gag-a-day comic was published in black-and-white, appearing three times a week. It eventually moved to the front page and became a color comic. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, 'Gridlock' was removed from the front page, because the turban-wearing character Sammy Singh might give readers the wrong impression that the comic poked fun at Muslims. By 2003, MacKay grew tired of the comic, because he wasn't fond of drawing cars and continuously rehashed old compositions through Photoshop to avoid redrawing vehicles from the same perspectives over and over again.
Cartoon of 22 March 2018, addressing the new gender-neutral policy of Service Canada.
Controversy
Throughout his career, Graeme MacKay's cartoons have caused frequent controversy. When the Progressive Conservative government repealed the 2015 Ontario sex education curriculum in favor of the pre-existing one, MacKay drew Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, talking in front of an overhead slide projection of an anatomical drawing of a male pelvis, while the caption reads: "A sex-ed snitch line has been set up to report any funny business." The cartoon caused controversy for depicting genitals. On 22 August 2017, MacKay published a cartoon depicting a Nazi with a tiki torch being beaten up by four hippies with peace signs. The cartoon was criticized for supposedly sympathizing with neo-Nazis. It caused so much unintentional uproar that MacKay removed it from his Facebook page. On 22 March 2018, MacKay addressed Service Canada's new policy of using gender-neutral language to address clients by making a cartoon where a woman instructs a clerk that she wants to be addressed in a whole string of pompous descriptions, only to reveal that "in Ms. Chatsworth's Gifted Class I went by 'Phil'." Quite a number of readers felt the cartoon ridiculed transgender people.
Cartoon depicting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould. 15 February 2019.
In 2019, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was accused of pressuring Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould to politically intervene during a criminal investigation of bribery and corruption within the company SNC-Lavalin. She resigned, while Trudeau remained in power. On 15 February 2019, MacKay drew a cartoon of Trudeau as a boxer in the ring, triumphing over Wilson-Raybould who lies down on the floor, bound, gagged and with a ball and chain reading "solicitor-client privilege" written on it. The cartoon drew objection because it parallelled violence against (indigenous) women, especially since Wilson-Raybould's caricature was shown in a defenseless position. A similar cartoon by Michael De Adder about the same topic drew criticism for the same reason.
During the first week of the 2021 Canadian federal election campaign, MacKay again caused controversy with a 20 August 2021 cartoon comparing and contrasting the Taliban with the Conservative Party of Canada.
Cartoon for the Hamilton Spectator of 20 August 2021, which caused controversy during the federal election campaign.
You Might Be From Hamilton If...
MacKay joined tother cartoonists like Michael De Adder (who tackled Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada itself), creating books poking fun at stereotypes about Canadian regions, provinces and cities, for the book 'You Might Be From Hamilton If...' (MacIntyre-Purcell, 2017).
Recognition
In 1996, Graeme MacKay won the Duncan MacPherson Award. He received the United Nations/Ranan Lurie Political Cartoon Award twice, in 2006 and 2013, and the George Townsend Award in 2014, 2018 and 2020.
Other activities
In August 2015, MacKay traced a Twitter account called @HarpersGotaGo, which took many editorial cartoons, removed the artist signatures and original dialogue and replaced it by their own comments often changing the original cartoon's meaning. He complained about their plagiarism and made it an issue in various newspapers.
Cartoon with self-portrait, 14 December 2012.