A new home for the sillier side of hockey on The Hockey News.
A new home for the sillier side of hockey on The Hockey News.
In the fall of 1988 one of the biggest sports stories in Canadian history was about to unfold.
Officials at the Seoul Summer Olympics announced Ben Johnson tested positive for steroids and stripped him of his gold medal in the 100M finals. The news came while I was at work at the University of Victoria’s ‘The Martlet’ student newspaper where one of my duties was creating editorial cartoons. Usually these would focus on University/student issues. Johnson changed everything.
I worked diligently to get my first sports editorial cartoon perfect. It had Ben Johnson crossing the finish line with a steroid filled needle around his neck. ‘The Martlet featured it prominently and even Victoria, B.C. 's weekly arts & entertainment paper, ‘Monday Magazine’, picked it up.
I was hooked.
I’d always loved sports and art so combining those loves seemed natural. After that first cartoon, I even branched off into sports commissions. But, I’d dreamed of working on projects like Star Wars and Star Trek, and set aside the cartoons to do just that. Yet, the love of making cartoons and the great Canadian hockey obsession never really faded.
Nearly twenty years later, sports cartooning and I met up once again. In 2007, Vancouver, B.C.’s Georgia Strait saw my ‘OFFSIDEsports’ cartoons online and asked if I could create them for their weekly magazine. I dove back in, focused mostly on Pacific Northwest sports stories. My ‘STRAIGHTjab’ cartoons were featured weekly in the magazine until 2013 when my ‘other’ career as an art dIrector for popular animated television and life as a young dad took precedence.
In early 2024, with one daughter at my alma mater and the other in high school, I had more space to create. So, I started a new sports editorial cartoon series called ‘OFFtheBARtoons’. The Hockey News took notice and TheHockeyTOONs was born.
Of course with TheHockeyTOONs, my primary focus is the NHL. For me, this is incredible. After years of Vancouver Canucks-focused cartoons, I get to stretch into the entire world of hockey and any stories that deserve attention or, even better, lampooning.
That’s the heart of it all.
The challenge with sports cartooning is encapsulating a story into one moment, one reaction. I get to satirize and have some fun with moments in a sport that gets more and more serious by the day. Ultimately, cartoons take a look at that story from a different angle to allow viewers to laugh or maybe even, at times, think.
Maybe not thoughts about illegally taking steroids to win a gold medal . . .
But hey, if you did… I’d probably make a cartoon about it.
