My reverence for cartoonists was learned at my mother’s knee. Each morning except Sundays she sat on her kitchen chair by the window, sipping successive cups of Choysa, chain-smoking unfiltered Capstans, chuckling at the Minhinnick cartoon in the Herald. I wasn’t sure why Walter Nash and Sid Holland were funny, not like Heckle and Jeckle or Elmer Fudd, but I was aware Mum held Minhinnick in high regard.
School was a cartoon-free zone, unless you count the after-school comics about the Bash Street Kids and other naughty characters. At university student cartoonists offered vulgar representations of politicians. I was vaguely aware of without much liking the cloth-capped Andy Capp before I went to work in London; I left five years later aware of and liking Giles and that a Kiwi called David Low caricatured Hitler.
I worked at the Listener alongside Tom Scott, who was instantly infamous for caricaturing Prime Minister Muldoon.When I left the magazine for the Wellington Evening Post Tom presented me with a farewell drawing of myself as a campaigning Christ in sandals and beard denouncing the powermongers, a reference perhaps to my new job as an investigative journalist, or my failed attempt to train to be a priest. Or something else. Cartoonists still sometimes puzzled me, but I was flattered to have been caricatured by the country’s leading cartoonist.
I worked at the Post with Minhinnick’s rival as the previous generation’s leading cartoonist, Nevile Lodge, maybe most famous for his All Blacks and Springbok cartoons. He illustrated my camping holiday feature with his cosy Kiwi style. I also co-edited a current affairs magazine a step on from student denunciation. I got Tom Scott, former student cartoonist, to do the covers. I got other cartoonists to contribute, like Bob Kerr, who had illustrated my celebrity interview column in the Listener; Jim Gorman, whom I met at School Publications; Jock Lee, whom I met about town; and most caustic of all cartoonists, the National Business Review’s Bob Brockie. Five original Kiwi cartoonists in one issue, I was on a roll.
I left the newspaper to edit a Wellington lifestyle magazine, which closed prematurely before our fledgling cartoonists got going. All this time from university through London and back I had been friendly with Burton Silver, who drew the Bogor cartoon in the Listener about a woodsman and a hedgehog and marijuana. Burton went on to produce weird and wonderful books, most famous Why Cats Paint. One of the hoax patrons in the book was called Dr McGill. When a San Francisco gallery exhibited Burton’s cat paintings, the Dr McGill painting he gifted me was valued at $58,000. Cartoonists were worth patronising.
The result of this lifetime of mixing with cartoonists is that the walls of my study are a gallery of Kiwi cartoonists: notably Tom Scott, who drew several covers of my Kiwi slang books; Nevile Lodge, who gave me his first cartoons done in a prisoner-of-war camp in World War Two Italy to use in a book I wrote on Kiwi POWs; a number of original Burton Silver three-dimensional artworks inspired by my extensive collection of owl figurines; a Tim Tripp cover for a children’s story I wrote called The Adventures of Horace-Thomas the Magic Horse; a sequence of owl cartoons by Murray Reece; covers by Trace Hodgson, the Listener cartoonist successor to Tom Scott, for my comic novels recently collected as The Kotuku Creek Chronicles.
Thank you, Mum, for imprinting a reverence for cartoonists, whose wit and skill and humour I am delighted and flattered to live with.