As Cape Breton as it gets
Iconic Old Trout Funnies finally gets much-deserved book release
Cape Bretoners of a certain age and political persuasion — they wished they’d gone to Woodstock and a photo of Richard Nixon still raises their blood pressure — will likely look back on Old Trout Funnies with great fondness.
Through a short-lived series of underground comic books in the mid-1970s and annual calendars that stretched on until 2000, Sydney Mines native Paul (Moose) MacKinnon poked gentle fun at our laid-back island through the antics of the Cape Breton Liberation Army’s larger-than-life counterculture heroes, who spent as much time worrying about their next pogey cheque as they did fighting mutant budworms and nefarious mainland politicians.
Now, for the first time, all of MacKinnon’s Old Trout Funnies graphic work, from comics and calendars to previously unpublished work, is available in one volume. And, thanks to the book’s editor, Ian Brodie, an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, "Old Trout Funnies: The Comic Origins of the Cape Breton Liberation Army" ($19.95, Cape Breton University Press) is more than just an invaluable one-stop for all things graphic concerning the CBLA.
In his perceptive, 20-page introduction to the book, "Contextualizing Old Trout Funnies," Brodie does just that. Though MacKinnon has always said he created his simple pen and ink drawings mostly for the amusement of a close circle of like-minded friends, Brodie quite rightly ties in the fictional shenanigans of the CBLA with some uneasy subtext from the era, when Cape Bretoners worried about capricious decisions in Halifax affecting their livelihoods and looming environmental hazards despoiling their pristine wilderness areas.
"The comics introduce the initiate to a Cape Breton culture that sees itself as distinct from the mainland . . . to the local, it is recognizably a presentation of Cape Breton," Brodie says in the closing paragraph of his introduction, and it’s difficult not to agree. Some of the best parts of "Old Trout Funnies" can only be instantly grasped by lifelong Capers, while the recently arrived would likely be left wondering what everyone else is laughing at.
Though everyone familiar with Old Trout Funnies will gravitate to a favourite character, be it Sgt. Stomper or Peyton the Semi-Barbarian (in real life, Dave MacDonald and Peyton Chisholm, respectively) or wild stories like the Wererats of Lingan or the bizaree mutant budworm infestation at Wreck Cove, the year-by-year calendars are perhaps the best distillation of MacKinnon’s comic view of Cape Breton life.
And no calendar does this better than the penultimate Cape Breton Liberation Army calendar from 1999, where MacKinnon takes a rueful look at the aging Cape Breton Liberation Army soldier. To the left of the calendar is an iconic drawing of the strapping, square-jawed CBLA soldier of the Seventies that we know so well: Hockey stick in hand, a bandolier of full beers strapped to his chest, a flight of darts protruding from his shirt pocket, and a case of beer on his back.
Contrast that with the older and wiser CBLA veteran, 20 years on, standing next to him: In place of the hockey stick, he’s holding a paint roller, in the bandolier, substitute tea bags for beer, a package of Viagra now occupies the shirt pocket, and a backpack, complete with grandchild, is now strapped to his back.
I don’t know about you, but to me that’s funny, mostly because it hits so close to the mark. And it’s as Cape Breton
as it gets, too.