Cartoon Character

In the Bora Laskin Law Library, at the University of Toronto, there hangs a mischievous portrait of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The work is a curiosity. Painted in the 1980s, from photographs and memory, it was a guerrilla commission by Duncan Macpherson, the legendary (and by then semi-retired) Toronto Star cartoonist. The prime minister is shown seated and full-face, like a Tudor monarch. “A rose in one hand and a twinkle in his eyes,” the critic Christopher Hume said of it. “Trudeau and the Commons have refused to have anything to do with the work.” To library staff and patrons, Macpherson’s rebellion in oils is probably more familiar than his life’s work: some three and a half decades of brilliant, fleeting editorial cartoons. Yet Macpherson was both loved and feared as a master satirist.

Professional Heckler is the first biography of the celebrated cartoonist. It is...