Terry Mosher

Aislin’s Favourite Covid Cartoons
Published by Aislin, 2021

Review by James Baxter 

What’s so funny about COVID-19? Terry Mosher can give you about 336 reasons to laugh, and that’s just the start.

“They’re still coming in,” said Mosher, the world-renowned cartoonist, better known as Aislin, who just released a new book, Aislin’s Favourite Covid Cartoons from Around the World. “It has been a really fascinating project, not to mention fun. And the response has been truly amazing.”

While cautioning that not all of the cartoons are “thigh slappers”, Mosher said the impetus for the book was simple: he was finding COVID to be an almost endless source of material for his regular editorial cartoons, which appear in the Montreal Gazette and numerous other news outlets throughout Canada, and he began to wonder what else was out there. When he began informally polling his cartooning colleagues, they reported having similar experiences.

As the idea of a retrospective anthology of COVID cartoons took shape, Mosher began receiving submissions from his network of brilliant Canadian cartoonists, including Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton), Bruce MacKinnon (Halifax), Brian Gable (Toronto), Patrick Corrigan (Toronto), Guy Badeaux (Ottawa) and Serge Chapleau (Montreal). From there, like the pandemic itself, Aislin went global. Mosher received cartoons from all over the world, including from some surprising places.

Iran, Mosher said, was the least expected of all. The quality of the cartoons from the Middle East and the level of dark humour as social commentary stood out. He said many of the best cartoonists in Turkey and Iran are women, and they don’t pull punches. “Women are kind of leading the way over there.” He said that while satirizing thin-skinned leaders is usually off-limits in countries we generally associate with media repression, corruption and social commentary are fairer game.

With hundreds of cartoons flooding in, Mosher and his wife, Mary Hughson, decided to create a book that would build a sense of a shared experience in the present and a meaningful retrospective that can be revisited by future generations. Profits from the book sales will benefit front-line institutions and their exhausted workers. 

“All the cartoonists and illustrators agreed to contribute their work for no charge since I will be donating a percentage of the book’s profits to a Montreal hospital that has done valiant work during the pandemic,” Mosher says in the book’s preface. “In return, these colleagues have free use of any of my cartoons to support a worthy cause in their own communities.”

But as we face our third winter of discontent and as news fatigue takes hold, Mosher’s book takes on even greater importance.

“The comic artists assembled in this anthology react to horrifying developments in close to real time, with a seriousness of purpose, variously providing not only perspective and humour, but occasionally assigning blame. They help us keep our wits about us,” said Barry Blitt of The New Yorker. He added “Pomposity, pettiness, vanity and venality are all easy targets of a barbed pen… (but) the frightful COVID scourge is a once-in-a-century villain without a face to caricature.” What makes Mosher’s book so interesting is to see how cartoonists creatively gave COVID-19 a recognizable face—the universal spiky blob—and then used it to great effect to show how this ubiquitous enemy has upended the lives of everyone on earth. 

While we have all been forced into our little bubbles, this collection encourages us to look beyond our pods, our cities and our national borders to see how others are being affected. And, though faced with so much bleak news and uncertainty, Mosher’s anthology gives us a licence to laugh, which is, and has always been, the best medicine.  

James Baxter is a journalist and writer based in Ottawa.