More than six decades ago, George Feyer became a giant in the world of Canadian cartooning.

A one-of-a-kind artist, Feyer’s work defied categorization. Inspired by a difficult past as a half-Jewish survivor of wartime Hungary, his work was brilliant, incisive, irreverent, and often quite dark. His cartoons cut through the pretentions and hypocrisies of 1950s North America — often without using a single word.

Between 1949 and 1967, Feyer drew hundreds of cartoons for more than forty publications around the world, including Collier’s, Punch, Maclean’s, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

He also became a nationally known television personality and children’s entertainer and owned several patents for innovative animation techniques.

He was part of a wave of Hungarian intellectuals, artists, and writers that immigrated to Canada after the Second World War.

He enjoyed huge success in his career, but continued to be haunted by the trauma of his wartime experiences throughout his life. Sadly, his life in 1967 in Los Angeles, where he was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Today, George Feyer continues to be known in the cartooning world as one of the greats.

Read more about Feyer in the article “The Twisted Genius of George Feyer” by Brad Mackay in the April-May 2015 issue of Canada’s History magazine.