Sneha Girap (Editor)

Bus Griffiths

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Nationality
  
Canadian

Role
  
Cartoonist

Name
  
Bus Griffiths

Notable works
  
Now You're Logging

Area(s)
  
Cartoonist


Bus Griffiths wwwharbourpublishingcomauthorpicturesBusGriff

Died
  
September 25, 2006, Comox, Canada

Books
  
Now You're Logging!, Now You're Logging

Gilbert Joseph "Bus" Griffiths (1913 – September 25, 2006) was a cartoonist, lumberjack, and fisherman. He was best known for his graphic novel Now You're Logging, published 1978 by Harbour Publishing. Now You're Logging presented, in cartoon form, a complete look at the techniques, tools, and personalities of logging on the West Coast in the 1930s.

Bus Griffiths The Logging Comics of Bus Griffiths Shrine of Dreams

He began drawing cartoons while working as a logger, doing work for Vancouver's Maple Leaf Publishing during World War II and comic strips about logging for BC Lumberman magazine. He retired from logging in 1961 and began work as a commercial fisherman. In 1972 he began work on Now You're Logging to document logging in the era before modern technology. A complete picture is presented of the techniques and lives of the typical logger of the 1930s, with tree felling and log bucking, high climbers, chasers, choker setters, a hooktender, an accident and rescue in the woods, the use of the crosscut saw, rigging, a spar (tree), log transport on both truck and water, and operation of the steam donkey all shown and explained. This depiction of logging is interwoven with a love story involving one of the loggers and the daughter of a fishing family near their logging camp.

Bus Griffiths The Logging Comics of Bus Griffiths Shrine of Dreams

The Comics Journal said about the book in 1996: "a true anomaly: written and drawn by a man with decades of experience in the woods, it's a book with no clear antecedent, more intent on documenting a way of life than telling a story", adding "it might just change your perception of what comics are, what they can do, and why we need them."

He also illustrated the children's book Patrick and the Backhoe by Howard White (Nightwood Editions) and Bush Poems by Peter Trower (Harbour Publishing).

References

Bus Griffiths Wikipedia