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"I was a political moron when I took this job--and I still am." So Leonard Norris, 38, describes his qualifications for the job of political cartoonist on the Vancouver Sun. Norris joined the paper two years ago as a staff artist drawing maps, diagrams, etc., and he took his present assignment under protest. But his ignorance of politics has hardly been a handicap. Last week, scarcely a year after he started newspaper cartooning, Norris was named the best cartoonist of 1951 in Canada's annual Toronto Press Club National Newspaper Awards, roughly equivalent to the U.S. Pulitzer Prizes. Many a Canadian went a step further and called him the best cartoonist Canada has ever had.

Family Man. Though the Sun bills Norris as a "political" cartoonist, he uses his pen and eye more for mild satire on the passing Canadian social scene. He feels that "symbolism, or worlds with faces and hairy guys labeled 'war,' are not my line." An admirer of famed London Daily Express Cartoonist Carl Giles (TIME, Dec. 11, 1950), Norris shows Giles's influence in his own work. Norris populates his world with shy, baffled citizens, harried housewives, fiercely determined children. He lampoons everything from Canada's first native-born Governor General and the laws against colored margarine to Colonel Blimpism at the Club. Typically, his prize-winning drawing spoofs the zeal of the Canadian Mounties searching for smuggled American cigarettes (see cut).

Like many another cartoonist, Norris has created a family: George Phelps, his wife and children, including Filbert, a chillingly destructive child. In one cartoon, Mrs. Phelps is shown applying for a job as a civilian-defense volunteer, with Filbert stealthily preparing a dynamite charge to blow up the office, and another child--at the end of a leash--growling savagely at a terrified dog. Asks the startled clerk: "And you say you have experience with riots, first aid, salvage and repair, a knowledge of weapons and nothing but contempt for the atom bomb?"

Local Angle. New to newspaper cartooning. Norris is an old hand at the drawing board. Born in London, he went to Canada as a child, just out of high school got a job as a draftsman. He skipped college, did drawings for ad agencies. During World War II, as a captain in the Canadian army, he put out a technical magazine.

At war's end Norris became art director of Maclean-Hunter's Canadian Homes & Gardens in Toronto, later moved west to the Sun. Publisher Don Cromie has not syndicated Norris because he likes the local angle and "I don't want him to swing his stuff toward the syndicated style." But now that his local boy has made good, Cromie may have to change his mind.

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