“Canada’s Greatest Cartoonist” Lou Skuce Enters Hall of Fame

D. D. Degg Published: June 7, 2025 Updated: June 8, 2025 1 minute 2 comments

The Doug Wright Awards were held Saturday night in Toronto. A part of the ceremony there are cartoonists inducted into The Giants of the North: The Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame.

After 20 years of seating cartoonists into the Hall of Fame they finally got around to installing Lou Skuce, aka “Canada’s Greatest Cartoonist,” as one of The Giants of the North.

*Lou Skuce inducted into Giants of the North*

From the Doug Wright Awards Facebook page:

This year’s first inductee into The Giants of the North: The Canadian Cartooning Hall of Fame is Lou Skuce (1886–1951), the newspaper and advertising cartoonist and showman known for much of the 20th century as Canada’s Greatest Cartoonist.

Skuce was a newspaper and magazine sports cartoonist, editorial cartoonist, comic strip creator, and illustrator.

In 2016 Conan Tobias for Taddle Creek wrote a detailed profile of Lou Skuce.

Skuce was working in his father’s blacksmith shop, in the village of Britannia, when, not long after the turn of the twentieth century, he began drawing cartoons for the Dipper, a small weekly newspaper based in nearby Ottawa.

Below is a Lou Skuce gallery.

*Lou Skuce, Waterloo Region Record 1922*

*Lou Skuce “Cash and Carrie,” The Times 1927*

*Lou Skuce “Scrambled Eggs by Lou’s Goose,” Toronto Star, 1932*

Richard Comely was also inducted into The Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame. His Captain Canuck was distributed throughout Canada and the United States during the 1970s (it was part of my regular picks).

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Peter C

Huh. From this post, I just learned about the proposed Georgian Bay ship canal after seeing it top right in the early Lou Skuce panel. A local Ontario megaproject, long proposed and wrangled over, that never happened, to make a shipping route that shortcut the St Lawrence – Lake Ontario- Welland Canal – Lake Erie route. A canal system that would have followed the old aboriginal & voyageur routes.

The “Great Basket Ball Girls” demonstration team (I guess) is also a curious bit of history. A show set up by a burlesque show promoter of the time (I looked it up). A chance in 1917 to watch fit women jump around, even if modestly attired so that nothing as racy as the bare skin of an arm or ankle is exposed to view? And notice the different style hoop used — looks like one would have to fish the ball out of the net every time.

Thanks for that historical cartooning stuff allowing my digression into social history, civil engineering, and politics….

Steven Rowe

The internet tells me that the “open hoop” in Basketball didn’t occur until 1912, so certainly folks in 1917 would be familiar with this “closed hoop”. Hopefully someone knowledgeable can tell us how widespread the non-open hoop was still used in 1917.
(so yes, cartoons can open a doorway to both knowledge and research)

Jun 08,2025

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“Canada’s Greatest Cartoonist” Lou Skuce Enters Hall of Fame

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Peter C

Steven Rowe

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