Customer Reviews

The Collected Doug Wright: Volume One: Canada's Master Cartoonist

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I was really please to find this collection of Droug Wrights' cartoons. He was truly a master of getting the joke across with little or no words. To be able to capture family life in just a few simple drawing is wonderful. Most of the cartoons are still current with life today. I love the fact that everything looks like it should- a table looks like a table picture at the right angle from the viewers perspective. I can't wait to see volume two. Anyone know when it is due out?

The value of this overpriced book is only to understand the cultural elite which Wright was part of in Montreal during the 1940-1950s. His work was the embodiment of the English-speaking upper class that dominated the French-speaking majority. The total omission of any historical context in Wright's work, and in the long introduction by the editors only reveals and reinforce English-speaking Canada's contempt and dislike for its French-speaking equivalent.

Wright's work was nowhere the equivalent of Charles Schultz as the publishers of the book try to assert. At best he was a good storyteller but with not much imagination or groundbreaking ideas. Even Hank Ketcham' Dennis the Menace was more "profound" with themes relatively similar.

As for the quality of the book, many of the strips were not cleaned up and showed the ridges of the original newspapers they were scanned from. Readers deserve more than bloated scans without any retouching. Interested readers might as well go to public archives and find similar source material at the same quality. There's no value added to this book.

The illustration work of Wright is good though and rendering silent scenes is his specialty.