Cultured cartoonist a master of the uncouth

The misadventures of Reid Fleming are being gathered in two hard-bound volumes, the first of which was released in December. David Boswell, Reid's creator, is being inducted into the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 23, 2011

VICTORIA

Before he said anything else, Reid Fleming said this: “I thought I told you to shut up!”

He is, after all, the World’s Toughest Milkman, a misanthropic purveyor of dairy products, a rye-swilling, fist-waving, milk truck-crashing troublemaker who insists, “I am not bald! I get my hair cut this way!”

Fleming is the anti-hero of an epic series of illustrated tales written by David Boswell, a Vancouver artist who has laboured for decades in near-obscurity and near-penury.
This inky Dr. Frankenstein is in person unlike his monster, which can disappoint hard-core fans who perhaps expect to be insulted and otherwise abused when meeting him. Mr. Boswell, 58, is suave, debonair and learned in cinematography, a sober-minded writer as cultured as Reid Fleming is uncouth.

Reid Fleming made his debut in the alternative Georgia Straight newspaper in 1978, starred in his first comic book two years later, and has remained in print ever since. The misadventures of the acerbic milkman are now being collected in two hard-bound volumes, the first of which was published late last year.

The character developed a cult following, among whom can be counted several Hollywood actors, many of whom have wanted to star in a Reid Fleming movie. The movie project has been ill-fated and seems destined never to reach the screen, which has kept Reid from finding a mass audience.

The good news is that the artist’s peers have noted his influence on a generation of alt-comix cartoonists.

Last week, it was announced Mr. Boswell will be inducted into the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May. He will join a pantheon known by the ink-and-scratchboard set as Giants of the North.

Mr. Boswell’s only other award nomination came in 1990 when he was nominated, along with Robert Crumb, for a prestigious Harvey Award for humour. The prize was won by Sergio Aragones of Mad magazine.

The return to Toronto will mark a homecoming, of sorts, for the artist, whose memoir of his 20s could be titled, Down and Out in Toronto and Vancouver.

Reid debuts in his own comic in 1980.

“In my mind, I’ll be contrasting now versus then,” Mr. Boswell said.

Born in London, Ont., the oldest of seven siblings, he studied filmmaking before taking a job as a darkroom technician for a commercial photographer in downtown Toronto. He lived in a $45-per-week rooming house on Collier Street, a dead-end near the intersection of Yonge and Bloor. His neighbours included addicts and dealers and down-and-outers.

When he learned New Yorker magazine paid $600 for a single cartoon, he figured he would try his hand at drawing, thinking he’d need only to sell a few to live an entire year. He got rejections from all the major magazines — Playboy, Esquire, National Lampoon — but these came with encouraging notes. A friend suggested he send his work to the Georgia Straight. “I’d never heard of it,” he recalled, “because I was a square.” The paper published a full page featuring a character known as Laszlo, Great Slavic Lover, who, in fact, was Hungarian and not a Slav, a typical deliberate misnomer on the artist’s part.

Boswell flew west on the promise of a job, only to be met at the airport by staffers who warned him the publication was on the brink of collapse.

Under the guidance of editor Bob Mercer, Mr. Boswell eventually got a $100-per-week staff position in which his responsibilities included spot cartoons and photographs (he took wondrous black-and-white portraits of Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen and Ginger Rogers), as well as a full-page weekly comic.

After 34 pages of Heart Break Comics featuring Laszlo, a demanding routine as the series was often set in the evenings, necessitating much detailed inking, Mr. Boswell decided to take a break with a one-off page featuring a pugnacious character named after the bully of his kindergarten class.

His readership, such as it was, demanded more Reid Fleming. As he did battle with the frustrating idiocies of everyday life, not to mention the plotting of his nemesis, Mr. Crabbe, his supervisor at Milk Inc., Reid Fleming became a tribune of frustrated workers, even as he also became a parody of workplace machismo.

Warner Bros. optioned the rights to a Reid Fleming movie, for which a script was written. Production seems unlikely, a disappointed Mr. Boswell said. Over the years, the project has attracted interest from Dave Thomas, Bob Hoskins, Jack Nicholson, Jim Carrey, Billy Bob Thornton and Paul Giamatti.

Meanwhile, Mr. Boswell is completing the final two chapters of the milkman’s magnum opus, bringing to an end a story that has lasted three decades. The hall of fame honours are a pleasant surprise.

“It’s nice to think that somebody thinks your work is worthy,” he said. “It’s nice after all these years to realize somebody is paying attention.”

He laughed.

“Does that sound too maudlin?”

A little.

“You can put in brackets (with tears in his eyes).”

Even when in conversation, Mr. Boswell writes his own script.

The darkened neon light of a family cafe

Tyke Thodos ordered a new sign for the family cafe soon after taking charge in 1950. He got a beauty. BELOW: Day-time cook Mr. Wong, photographed in 1973 by Nina Raginsky.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
February 2, 2011

VICTORIA

The bread came stacked on a tiny plate, slices cut thick. On a good day, the supply was replenished as soon as you dipped the last piece into a bowl of chowder.

Constantine Thodos, known as Tyke, thought his customers deserved tasty bread, strong coffee, and fresh fish. He supplied all at a reasonable price.

Mr. Thodos took over the family cafe in Vancouver at age 24 in 1950. He was involved in its operation for decades. On his death two weeks ago, aged 84, the city lost a restaurateur deserving of accolades for nurturing an oasis of good eats in a neighbourhood suffering from a long decline.

His father had been slinging hash in Vancouver since before he was born.

Nick Thodos, who chased gold in the Yukon, became cook and part-owner of the English Kitchen in 1912, likely walking the four blocks to work each morning from his room at the Patricia Hotel.

He was eventually joined by his brother, Gustave, who worked as a waiter. The two opened a restaurant of their own five doors west in a former jewelry store at 20 East Hastings St.

In those days, the Hastings strip was the heart of the city’s business district, crowded with theatres and new brick office buildings.

Their joint boasted a roof of pressed tin and 18 stools around a counter. Patrons crowded the tiny cafe, eager to sample seafoods fried and boiled and steamed with Mediterranean flair by the chef. The brothers named it The Only cafe.

By the time Tyke took over, the city’s commercial centre had moved, but the old neighbourhood remained busy with loggers, fishermen and shoppers visiting the nearby Woodward’s department store. The city’s newspaper offices were just a short stagger away. Theatre patrons in their finest dropped in for a snack after the show.

Tyke squeezed two booths into the tiny space. He ordered clams from Thetis Island and got the day’s catch from the docks at the foot of Campbell Avenue. The cafe had a four-page cardboard menu, but all you needed to know you could see in the front display windows, where fish rested on beds of ice.

The son had been running the place for less than a year when he made a propitious decision by commissioning a sign from Neon Products.

He got a beauty of neon tubing and sheet metal painted yellow-gold and navy blue. At night, ONLY SEA FOODS was illuminated in an eerie green, while a sea horse, the tail oddly curled in the wrong direction, was lit in orange outline with fiery red eyes.

For decades, the sign was a beacon for those seeking an honest meal at a fair price.

Tyke operated The Only with help from his brothers. One of them, a chunky athlete named Pete, played professional football. In 1948, Pete traveled to Varsity Stadium in Toronto for the Grey Cup game. With his Calgary Stampeders trailing the Ottawa Rough Riders, by 7-6, the son and brother of restaurateurs was handed the ball.

What happened next was described by Jim Coleman in the Globe: “The stunned Ottawa linemen shifted to the right to stop two Calgary decoys, and Pete Thodos scored easily as he galloped through strangely uninhabited territory.”

Pete Thodos scored the winning touchdown in Calgary’s first Grey Cup championship. He later played a single game for the B.C. Lions in their inaugural season.

The cafe fed generations of artists, writers and musicians, some of whom became convinced that the cafe’s sweaty, ruddy-faced short-order cook was the model for the cartoon character Reid Fleming, the World’s Toughest Milkman. David Boswell, the illustrator, created the character before coming to the city, but acknowledges a strong resemblance.

The artist Keith McKellar, who has written a splendid ode to The Only in his book “Neon Eulogy,” recalls drunks passing out at the counter, only to be awakened by the cook administering a pinch to the back of the neck.

The family handed over day-to-day management of the cafe in the early 1990s, as the neighbourhood declined in the post-Expo 86 era. Police discovered open drug dealing inside the cafe and it was closed for health violations 20 months ago. It has been reported the rights to the cafe’s name have been leased to the Portland Housing Society, which has expressed interest in operating a cafe as a social enterprise. Last summer, the spectacular neon sign was removed for repairs and safekeeping.

On Friday afternoon, friends and family are to gather at the Hellenic Community Centre to celebrate the life of a man who kept the city fed with pepper chowder and halibut cheeks.

Many of the artists and musicians who enjoyed The Only's good eats at fair prices thought the cook a dead ringer for the cartoon character, "Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman." David Boswell conjured the character in his imagination before moving to Vancouver, but went to 20 E. Hastings St. to check out Reid's doppelganger. He snapped this photo in 1983.