After emigrating to
Canada in 1938, Wright worked as an
illustrator at an insurance company before serving in the
Royal Canadian Air Force during World War Two. It was here that his cartoons of fellow servicemen first drew the eye of a magazine editor. After freelancing in
Montreal for a few years after the war, Wright took over
Juniper Junction in 1948 after its creator,
Jimmy Frise, died suddenly. Within a year, Wright launched a wordless and untitled gag strip about a little boy for the
Montreal Standard (called
The Weekend magazine after 1951). Eventually entitled
Nipper, the strip switched to
The Canadian, another national weekly newspaper supplement, in 1967 and the name was changed to ''Doug Wright's Family''. Wright suffered a stroke in March 1980, and had another stroke on January 3, 1983. He died the next day in hospital at the age of 65.
Nipper was a wordless masterpiece, capturing suburban Canadian life with wit and a keen eye, and ran uninterrupted for more than three decades. Wright also drew several other strips, including
Max & Mini,
Cynthia and
The Wheels, and a series of editorial cartoons which were collected during the seventies. Wright moved from Montreal to
Burlington, Ontario in 1966. He was married to Phyllis Sanford, and had three sons: William (1953–2020), James and Kenneth. In 2005, the
Doug Wright Awards, named in Wright's honour, recognizing Canadian cartoonists and graphic novelists, were founded. Wright himself was amongst the inaugural inductees into the
Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame (also known as Giants of the North). In Spring 2009,
Drawn & Quarterly Books published the first volume of a
retrospective of Wright's life and career. Designed and compiled by
Guelph, Ontario-based cartoonist
Seth, the project (''Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist
) contains a biographical essay on Wright, and is the first book-length study of the prolific artist. They also published strip reprints of Nipper'', starting in 2011. Three volumes have been published covering 1963–1964, 1965–1966 and 1967–1968. ==Bibliography==