Former L-P cartoonist gets honorary doctorate
SASKATOON — Brian Gable’s cartooning career started when a fellow University of Saskatchewan student saw him doodling in class. More than forty years, thousands of cartoons and four National Newspaper Awards (NNAs) later, the U of S is awarding him with an honorary doctorate.
“It’s a real honour,” Gable said Thursday. “It was a very important part of my life, those four years here.”
Gable’s classmate invited him to draw for the Sheaf, the U of S student newspaper. He still remembers the first rush of seeing his work published.
“It was like a drug. Nothing is better than having your name on a newspaper, with a drawing people sometimes laugh at,” Gable remarked.
He loved the work, but didn’t see much of a future in it. After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in 1970, he spent a year getting an education certificate from the University of Toronto and settled in Brockville, Ont., working as a high school art teacher.
“When you graduate from fine arts, you take the path that pays your bills,” Gable said.
The plan was to teach for a few years and save enough that he could paint full time. “A few years” ended up being nine. As time wore on, he started to worry he might never find a career he was passionate about.
“It became obvious my time was running out,” Gable said.
Remembering how much he enjoyed cartooning, he approached the editor at the Brockville Recorder and convinced him to run one cartoon a week. He kept the gig up for three years.
Gable still wanted a fulltime cartooning job. He found it back in his home province in 1980, when he moved to Regina to draw for the LeaderPost.
He fudged his credentials a bit — telling them he could do graphic design — but his cartoons were strong enough that it didn’t matter. Having grown up in Saskatchewan, he was able to represent the breadth of people in the province, unlike the portrayals often seen from national cartoonists.
“They always drew them as farmers with a pitchfork,” Gable said.
Leader-Post columnist Will Chabun, who was already working in the newsroom at the time, remembers Gable as smart, funny and very good.
“He was very fast and very skilled,” Chabun said.
Gable spent seven years at the Leader-Post. It was there he earned his first NNA, in 1986. When he travelled to the ceremony, he met an editor from the Globe and Mail, which happened to have a cartoonist retiring. Gable moved to Toronto the next year. He never left.
Upon taking up the role of national cartoonist, Gable had to reshape the way he came at his work. Some of the things that played well in Regina, such as the CFL, fell flat on the national stage. He also had to be very conscious of not focusing his satirical gaze on any one topic too often.
“You have to be very careful as a cartoonist in a national newspaper that you don’t become propaganda,” Gable said.
He seems to have figured it out. Gable has won three more NNAs — in 1995, 2001, and 2005 — and many more nominations.
He will receive the honorary Doctor of Letters as part of the fall convocation Saturday at TCU Place. He said being recognized feels good, but it has never been what drives him.
“I don’t do the job with the idea I might get an award,” he said.
Having watched Gable’s career flourish, Chabun said the honour is well-deserved.
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, he has spoken volumes,” Chabun said.