Cartoonist riffs on humours of farm life

Cartoonist Jeff Wilson has published two new books about farm life: The Complete Flatt’s Farm and The Avridge Farm Companion.

In the 90s both comic strips were published in newspapers in Barrie, Dundalk, Flesherton, Durham, Markdale, Toronto, Hamilton and Owen Sound and The Avridge Farm continues to run in The Creemore Echo and Middlesex Banner.

The Avridge Farm is the story of Irv Avridge who leaves the city with his wife and family to return to his childhood home to help his widowed mother run the family farm, illustrating the delights and trials, both seen and unseen, of rural life.

“Overall, I’ve tried to chronicle the common human experience,” said Wilson.

Wilson grew up on a farm in Glenelg Township, in Grey County, where he says he started drawing comic strips from a very young age. 

The Avridge family lived in an urban area at one time and it was cartoonist Lynn Johnston, of For Better of For Worse fame, who advised Wilson to forget city life and write about what he knows so the Avridge family was relocated to a farm setting. 

“That was when the creative process really began to kick in but the only problem was the urban newspapers weren’t really that receptive to it,” said Wilson adding that it was a better fit for the rural and farm newspapers. 

“The rural lifestyle isn’t funny to everybody but I saw the comedy in it. As I worked at it, it started to come through, and I developed the characters,” he said.

In Flatt’s Farm Wilson imagines the personalities of the farm animals living on the farm of Fred Flatt, a curmudgeonly single farmer working his land, oblivious to the varying degrees of dysfunction exhibited by his livestock.

Wilson worked as an animator on Adventures Of Teddy Ruxpin in 1986-87 and wrote and illustrated The Miserable Social Life Of Singleton Solo under the pen name, I.M. Bleiden for The Tin Roof, variously from 1989 to 1999.

The new comic books cost $10 and are available online at Amazon.ca or by e-mailing jeffwil58@gmail.com.