CARTOONIST PROFILE

Bio

Born in Montreal on May 21, 1949, Guy Badeaux (Bado) won the 1991 National Newspaper Award for cartooning, Canada’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize, after selling his soul to the devil at the famous crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi during the AAEC’s convention in Memphis the previous year.

Based in the Ottawa region, he has been working at the French-language daily Le Droit since 1981 and has published 13 collections of his work. He was also the editor of Portfoolio: The Year’s Best Canadian Editorial Cartoons for 23 years beginning in 1985.

Bado knew he wanted to be an artist at a young age; he occupied his school time by drawing caricatures in his notebooks. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his great grandfather and two great uncles, who were all accomplished artists. “I always drew in the middle of the notebook, where I could pull the pages out.”

In 1971, when he returned to Montreal from a 10 months stay in France, where he attended classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he got work doing profiles of captains of industry for the Montreal Gazette‘s business section. It was there that he fell under the mentorship of cartoonist Terry Mosher (Aislin).

He also began doing in-between drawings at Potterton animation studio, for the half-hour animation cartoon The Happy Prince. But he soon found he didn’t like labouring on someone else’s work. “I got bored with that very quickly.” admits Bado. “It was good school for me, because I was drawing all day long. But it was not very exciting work.”

He then hooked up with Le Devoir, where he did caricatures of famous literary figures (including the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn). But he was let go two years later when the art section editor left the paper.

Desperate, Bado got work doing comic strips for Canada Steamship Lines’ newsletter. In 1979, he began drawing for Croc, a National Lampoon-like magazine that was at the time Quebec’s most vibrant humor publication. That was his last foray in comics before becoming an editorial cartoonist.

While he still misses doing comics, he finds that caricature and political cartoons are good therapy. “I get really mad when I read the paper. By doing cartoons, I feel that I can maybe help right some wrongs.”