Terry Mosher — better known by his pen name Aislin — is a Canadian legend. He has won just about every award you can in the Great White North, and chalks up his much of his success to his favorite city. "Montreal is a very interesting market for satire of all sorts. We are home to the largest humour festival in the world. Also, unlike elsewhere, cartooning still thrives here in that we have seven cartoonists drawing for the editorial pages of four different newspapers. Therefore, we are very good here at laughing at ourselves. And the best reaction I get to my work is usually on local subject matter."
*Editor's note: The above cartoons are about a municipal election where the incumbent was soundly defeated by a young Valerie Plante, who often referred to herself as a capped wonder woman.
Meanwhile, in the deep south, Fred Mulhearn has been drawing about Louisiana politics since 1980. His cartoons appear in newspapers across the state, mostly weeklies. For the past few years, Mulhearn has spent a lot of ink on a growing budget crisis and the Legislature's numerous failed sessions and flailing attempts to reach a compromise. Over the decades, Mulhearn has published enough cartoons to fill a book, and a few weeks ago he released “Looziana Political Cartoons: The Best of Fred Mulhearn.”
[Throughout his life, Rex Babin championed those who focused on state and local issues in editorial cartoons, a field that he and other cartoonists felt was regularly overlooked by journalism contests. The "Rex Babin Memorial Award for Excellence in Local Cartooning" was launched in 2017 to celebrate those working in this niche. To that end, we will be showcasing each cartoonist who entered the contest this year, one or two each day in alphabetical order (more or less), leading up to the AAEC Convention in Sacramento, CA, and the announcement of the award winner on Saturday, Sept. 22.]
