John Collins was born in Washington in 1917 and his family moved to Montréal in 1920. At an early age, he discovered that he has the ability to draw pictures and a sense of humor. He studied drawing at Sir George Williams University, which in 1974 joined with Loyola College to become Concordia University, and at the Montreal School of Fine Arts.
In 1939, while he was still a student, Collins proposed his first cartoon to The Gazette newspaper. Soon after, he became the newspaper’s first political cartoonist, a position he held for the next four decades until his retirement in 1982.
During his career at The Gazette, Collins drew more than 15,000 cartoons. Critics often pointed out the lack of malice in his drawings which encouraged thoughts rather than indignation and insult. Among his figures, his famous “Uno Who”, a little guy wearing a barrel and a bowler hat too big for him who personified the average tax payer. Created in the 1940’s, this figure won the public’s support and became Collins’ trademark and keep coming back in the cartoons he published in The Gazette.
The thousands of cartoons that Collins produced during his long career earned him numerous honors, in particular the National Newspaper Award for Political Cartooning, which he won twice in 1954 and 1973.
In parallel with his cartoonist job, Collins also worked as a graphic artist and collaborated on the illustrations of Edgar Andrew Collard’s columns published in The Gazette. He has also created sketches and watercolors of various landscapes in Montréal. Several of his work has been exhibited and a lot of them are sought by collectors.
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