GIANTS of the NORTH:
The Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame

Welcome to Giants of the North, a virtual exhibit that celebrates singular, life-long contributions to the art of cartooning in Canada! 
The Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame was founded in 2005 as part of the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning. 

Rand Holmes
(1942 – 2002) 

Born in Truro, Nova Scotia in 1942, Rand Holmes is best known for his seminal underground comic strip Harold Hedd which ran in the Vancouver’s alt-weekly The Georgia Straight in the 1970s. An avid admirer of U.S. cartoonists Will Eisner and Wally Wood as he was growing up in Edmonton, Holmes first comics were published in his 20s in Harvey Kurtzman’s Help!. 

After struggling to make a living as a cartoonist and sign painter in Alberta, in the late 1960s Holmes moved to B.C. to seek out work as an illustrator. In short order, he landed freelance work drawing covers for the left-leaning Straight, and not long after debuted his most popular creation. A bespectacled hippie who spent his time dealing dope and plaguing Vancouver’s tourists, Harold Hedd quickly became a counter-culture icon.

Hedd’s adventures often took dead aim at the city’s establishment, including its hippie-hating mayor Tom Campbell and its oft-criticized police department (which reacted by laying obscenity charges against him and the paper). In 1971, Holmes shot to fame after drawing a strip for a marijuana-rights magazine — “Yes Virginia, There Really Are Pigs”— that lambasted the Vancouver Police’s role in the notorious Gastown Riots (aka the “Grasstown Massacre”).

In 1973, Holmes strips were collected by American underground stalwart Last Gasp in Harold Hedd #2. The move opened up a wider audience for Holmes creation, and secured him a role as a fixture on the comix scene. Throughout the decade, Holmes contributed to a number of anthologies, including All-Canadian Beaver Comics, White Lunch Comix, Slow Death and Fog City Comics.

In the 1980s, years after the decline of underground comix, Holmes returned to comics with the publication of the two-part series Hitler’s Cocaine, along with stories in Snarf, Death Rattle, and Alien World.   

Later in the decade, he and his wife moved to Lasqueti Island, a tiny island off the B.C. coast, where he lived off the land and devoted his time to his elaborate oil paintings. He died in 2002, while being treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

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