In the fluorescent hush of hospital waiting rooms, where beepers break the silence and barely audible talk shows play in the background on TV screens, an 84-year-old artist began to draw.
The sketches were quick and wry: porters in a blur, the choreography of chairs, the small absurdities that gather around illness. Nurses photocopied them. Patients passed them hand to hand. Before long, a stapled stack by reception had a title: “Ted’s Toons.”
The artist is Ted Michener, a Charlotte County mainstay whose career has braided fine art, commercial illustration and decades of community cartooning. Trained at the prestigious Ontario College of Art and Design, Michener has lived and worked for years in St. Andrews, where he also owns The Gables restaurant and gallery. He has been the cartoonist for The Courier for over 30 years, shining a light on the good, the bad and the hilarious side of life in rural southwest New Brunswick, saying with satire what news stories sometimes can’t – about politics, civic life and society.
The drawings that became Ted’s Toons: A Cancer Patient’s Look — On the Brighter Side Through Doodling grew out of something even more personal than the region where he resides: his own cancer treatments.
“It just evolved from waiting for my procedures at the local hospitals. I’ve always been a doodler,” said Michener to The Courier. “I would sketch while I was waiting for the buzzer to go off to go in for my procedure.”
The impulse, he added, was less about self-expression than atmosphere: a humane interruption of worry. He noticed faces change when the pen came out; rooms loosened. Early bundles were collated by nurses and, with encouragement from supporters, gathered into a small book meant for fellow patients.
“I’d look around, I’d see the various looks on people’s faces, various moods, obviously,” said Michener, recalling his time in the oncology waiting room in particular. “I thought, ‘Gee, what can I do to alleviate the feelings within people’s minds?’ So people gathered around, watched me sketching, and right away, it worked. It seemed to lighten people’s load up somewhat, if only for a few moments. And then, of course, the nurses would do a copy and pin it up, and that was nice.”
The tone of the cartoons is observational rather than sentimental. Some panels fix on daily frictions: food rules, long stairways, the prosaic hardship of getting from car to clinic. Others aim gently at small inequities. Michener was struck, for instance, by the reality that parking isn’t free for even the staff at many New Brunswick hospitals.
“What amazed me was the nurses have to pay for parking. That’s one of the cartoons. I couldn’t believe that,” recalled Michener. “And there are 22 steps up to the parking lot. I’m 84 years old, and I have asthma, and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ So many times I’ve been huffing and puffing going up the stairs to the top, especially in the winter when it’s icy. And a couple of times people have said, ‘You made it!’ That’s another cartoon, too.”
If the drawings are light, the ethic behind them is serious. Humour, for Michener, is a form of care. He talks about volunteers and drivers, the Charlotte Dial-A-Ride network that ferries rural residents to medical appointments, as part of the region’s quiet infrastructure of help. He credits Charlotte County Cancer, a long-standing local nonprofit, with assisting early print runs meant to be given away in waiting rooms.
Michener’s trajectory helps explain the balance in the work. As a young artist, he studied with teachers linked to members of the Group of Seven and later taught at his alma mater; his illustration and editorial cartoons appeared in national papers and magazines before he and his wife settled on the Passamaquoddy Bay. Recent exhibitions in New Brunswick and Maine have kept his paintings in public view even as the cartoons have found a different audience, one waiting for lab results.
He is not interested in selling the book so much as getting it into people’s hands. He is seeking a partner – a health authority, a foundation or a publisher – to underwrite larger printings for hospitals and clinics. Until then, he keeps drawing. A second volume is underway.
What has changed now that his own diagnosis is the subject? Less than one might think. He still measures time in images.
“I’m still fairly active,” he said. “So far, so good.”
At night he paints, sometimes with only a loon calling across the bay, and in the morning he returns to the sketchpad, looking for punchlines in corridors and parking meters. The effect of the cartoons, in his telling, is modest but real: a circle formed where strangers wait.
A single laugh won’t cure cancer, but it can lift a soul. In the most uncertain of times, Ted’s sketches remind people they’re still human, still here, still capable of joy, and sometimes that flicker of light is what gives a person the courage to keep moving toward tomorrow.
Copies of Ted’s Toons are available for $20 at Charlotte County Hospital, Cockburn’s Drug Store and The Nautical Shop. If you would like to assist with a print run of Ted’s Toons, please contact Ted Michener directly via email: tedmichener@gmail.com
