You can tell that I've been away from Nova Scotia for a long while when I still think of Bob Chambers as the Chronicle-Herald's cartoonist. (To put that in perspective, current Herald cartoonist Bruce MacKinnon has just brought out a 25th-anniversary edition of his cartoons.) Precious little about or by Chambers comes up in a Google search, so I don't think I'm doing him a disservice by scanning the best cartoon from his best year, 1966. Here we see John Diefenbaker refusing to take the fall for the Gerda Munsinger Affair.
Chambers was a caricaturist first and foremost. His Diefenbaker and Stanfield can't be beat. His head to body ratio approaches reality without quite getting there, lending his political figures the appearance of small boys pretending to be politicians. And there's never any venom, which suited the Herald's famously non-confrontational editorial stance in those days. His gags generally depend too much on little expository bits of text, but he caught Dief's character wordlessly in the panel above. D
Comments