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A history of comics, editorial cartoons at the Star,
Did you know that Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, first worked as a reporter at the Daily Star?
Yes, Toronto native Joe Shuster — who co-created the world-famous Man of Steel comic character along with American writer Jerry Siegel — originally had him working at a newspaper named after the Toronto Star in a city called Metropolis, modelled after Toronto. And the newspaper building was based on the Star’s old haunts at 80 King St. W.
Shuster had worked downtown as a Star newsboy, before his family moved to Cleveland when he was 10 years old.
In a 1992 exclusive interview with a Star reporter, the then 77-year-old artist said he had “very fond memories” of the Star and that the sights and sounds he experienced as a newsboy re-emerged in his Metropolis drawings.
Superman first appeared in print in a 1938 Action Comics book, but he made his debut as a newspaper comic strip superhero in 1939. In 1940, on orders from a New York editor, Shuster and Siegel changed the name of Kent’s newspaper to the Daily Planet. The Superman strip was syndicated and ran in the Star and other newspapers for decades.
Like other kids of his pre-TV generation, Shuster’s favourite day was Saturday, when the Star published colour comics.
Of course, adults were also huge fans of “the funnies.”
In fact, from the late 1890s through the 1940s, “comic strips were arguably the most important tool newspapers had to build circulation,” says Dean Mullaney, creative director for the Library of American Comics. A 1930 study by George Gallup found that “more adults read the best comic strip in a newspaper in an average day than the first-rate banner story,” Mullaney told the Star. “Newspaper syndicates would consistently try to lure cartoonists from other syndicates.”
Toronto Star publisher Joseph E. Atkinson realized the advantages of syndication and in1921he started the Toronto Star Syndicate (now called Torstar Syndication Services). The Star Syndicate sublicensed comics and features offered by the American-based King Features Syndicate, which incorporated in1915. It’s a relationship that continues today.
Two of the oldest strips, of the close to 50 the Star still publishes, are Blondie and Beetle Bailey, which both run in Saturday’s paper. Blondie was created by Chic Young in 1930 and has been continued by his son, Dean, since1973. Blondie Boopadoop started as a gorgeous flapper whose boyfriends included rich playboy Dagwood Bumstead. Then the Depression hit. Blondie married Dagwood and his parents disinherited him over that “gold digger.” Beetle Bailey started in 1950 as a college-themed strip but the bumbling Beetle joined the army and his escapades continue. Strip creator Mort Walker is now 92 and still drawing.
Canadian talent, too, has also been a huge part of the Star’s comic strip roster.
Scugog, Ont.-born Jimmy Frise was 19 and a sketch artist and doodler with no formal training when he came to Toronto in 1910. He was hired as a Star staff artist after submitting a freelance cartoon relating to a local topic that showed the Star’s editor milking a cow from the wrong side.
By 1920, Frise had a half-page cartoon strip in the Star Weekly (the Star’s weekend magazine) called Birdseye Center. It poked gentle fun at rural affairs and included characters like Old Archie and his pet moose, Foghorn. The mythical village was “any Canadian village with a hotel, a gasoline station, a barber shop and a town pump,” Frise once told a Star interviewer.
In1926, Frise’s weekly strip was voted the readers’ favourite in a poll, beating other popular syndicated strips. Remarkably, Frise’s strip wasn’t named on the ballot — it was written in by readers.
Frise left the Star for the Montreal Standard in 1947. He died suddenly in 1948 at the age of 57.
While still at the Star, Frise befriended Walter Ball, another artist with no formal training, hired at the age of 21. Before he got the job, Ball — a farmer’s son from Cookstown, Ont. — would send his sketches to the Star every six months and ask for a job. He finally got a letter from legendary managing editor Harry Hindmarsh, who invited him in for an interview and hired him as a graphic artist in 1931. Two weeks after getting the job, Ball got a letter from another editor saying he wasn’t good enough to get a job at the Star.
In 1956, when the Star redesigned Star Weekly, Ball submitted a car- toon strip he’d created called Rural Route. It was accepted. Within a month, the strip — which featured a small town youth named Willie and his farmer Uncle Elmer and Aunt Myrtle — had become the most-read feature in Star Weekly. It ran until Star Weekly folded in 1968.
Many readers want more than just funny diversion. The sharp pen wielded by editorial cartoonists attracts those who love lampooning and political commentary.
Les Callan worked as an editorial cartoonist at the Star from 1937 to 1961 and was known for his subtle satire. On his 20th anniversary with the newspaper, the Star congratulated him in print and noted that while he poked fun at people and policy, his goal was “never to hurt the person himself.”
Duncan Macpherson blazed a different sort of path as an editorial cartoonist from 1958 to 1993, the same year he died. The late Star columnist Gary Lautens once described Macpherson’s acidic pen style as a mix of “Mary Poppins, Mark Twain and Attila the Hun.”
Montreal Gazette cartoonist Terry “Aislin” Mosher told the Star in a 2008 interview that Macpherson was the “King Kong of cartooning when I was getting into the business . . . You can’t imagine how influential Duncan was at a time when Canadian political cartooning was influenced by a mundane American approach.” Macpherson — who was once told as a boy that he’d “never amount to anything” — won six National Newspaper Awards for his editorial cartoons.
The late author and former Star columnist Pierre Berton once said former prime minister John Diefenbaker was “destroyed” by Macpherson’s 1959 caricature of him as a toothy Marie Antoinette crying “Then let them eat cake!”
It was in response to Diefenbaker’s decision to kill production of the Avro Arrow fighter jet, which some considered Canada’s greatest achieve- ment in aviation.
Macpherson used his popularity to bargain for greater autonomy as a cartoonist.
There were times when his published cartoons were at odds with the paper’s editorial stance. And there were times when the Star refused to publish his cartoons.
“Macpherson established a new ground rule for all political cartoonists to follow: Never give an editor an even break,” Mosher told Star reporter Alan Barnes, who wrote Macpherson’s 1993 obituary.