Edward Franklin, editorial cartoonist for The Globe and Mail, passed away recently. He was an american working for a Canadian newspaper.
For Edward Livingston Franklin, editorial cartooning is just one more thing he sees dying. It has been his work at The Globe and Mail for 16 years, and he believes that editorial policies, deadlines and interference are destroying his art.form in Toronto.
Now 62, Franklin was born in a logging camp in Chireno, Texas, near the Louisiana border and grew up to drive trucks, trailers and tractors in his father’s lumber and ..timber business. Self-taught in art, his flair launched him into newspaper cartooning when he returned home after serving in England during World War II. He began working for the Houston Press after winning a contest for drawing Lena the Hyena, a character in an Al Capp comic strip. From the Press, Franklin went to the Houston Post and then to New York to study illustration at the Pride Institute. He married and had two sons, and in 1959 moved his family to Toronto where he found work in the city’s engraving houses. He began to freelance for the Globe in 1966 following a phone call its then cartoonist Jim Reidford, but he wasn’t hired full-time until he’d spent 18 months at The Toronto Star filling in occasionally for Duncan Macpherson.