Biography
After emigrating to Canada in 1938, Wright worked as an illustrator at an insurance company before serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War Two. It was here that his cartoons of fellow servicemen first drew the eye of a magazine editor. After freelancing in Montreal for a few years after the war, Wright took over Juniper Junction in 1948 after its creator, Jimmy Frise, died suddenly. Within a year, Wright launched a wordless and untitled gag strip about a little boy for the Montreal Standard. Eventually entitled Nipper, the strip switched magazines in 1967 and the name was changed to Doug Wright's Family. Wright suffered a stroke in March 1980, and had another stroke on January 3, 1983. He died the next day in hospital at the age of 65.
Nipper was a wordless masterpiece, capturing suburban Canadian life with wit and a keen eye, and ran uninterrupted for more than three decades. Wright also drew several other lesser-known strips, including Max & Mini, Cynthia and The Wheels, and a series of editorial cartoons which were collected during the seventies.
Wright moved from Montreal to Burlington, Ontario in 1966.
In 2005, the Doug Wright Awards, named in Wright's honour, recognizing Canadian cartoonists and graphic novelists, were founded. Wright himself was amongst the inaugural inductees into the Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame (also known as Giants of the North).
In Spring 2009, Drawn and Quarterly Books published the first volume of a two-volume retrospective of Wright's life and career. Designed and compiled by Guelph, Ontario-based cartoonist Seth, the project (Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist) contains a biographical essay on Wright, and is the first book-length study of the prolific artist. They also published strip reprints of Nipper, starting in 2011. One volume covers 1963–1964, another 1965–1966.
Read more about this topic: Doug Wright (cartoonist)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)