| Andy Donato inside his studio in 2015 |
With great sadness I learned that a long time ago toronto sun cartoonist Andy Donato He died at age 89 after suffering a head injury during a fall while playing a round at his beloved Hunt Club golf course.
Donato was born on January 13, 1937 in Scarborough.
He graduated from Danforth Technical School in 1955 and worked at Eaton’s as a layout designer before joining The Toronto Telegram in 1961 as a graphic artist working in the promotion department.
“The first cartoon I drew was in 1964 about the Canadian flag debate in Ottawa. The editor saw it and said, ‘Oh, well, I can publish it.'”
It not only worked in Telegram but it was also published in the American Encyclopedia.
Donato started on a trial basis for three months, replacing each time Telegram staff cartoonist Al Beaton It was off.
After the death of Toronto Telegramwhere he had worked as the newspaper’s art director and editorial cartoonist, he was instrumental in the success of the Sun and Sun Media since the first day of publication, November 1, 1971,
like him SunThe art director, Andy, designed the first toronto sun logo, cover and the general look of the newspaper, on your kitchen table in the weeks leading up to the SunThe first edition.
“It was hard enough to come up with one idea, let alone three, four, five,” he laughs.
But clearly, the news gave Donato all the material he needed, although he admitted that “the summer months, when Parliament suspends its sessions and all that, were hard.”
Trudeau (“the father, not the son,” Donato made sure to clarify) was the favorite target of the Sun in the past.
“We fought him tooth and nail; we thought he was too socialist,” he recalled.
But then along came Mulroney, as his Progressive Conservatives swept away the Liberals, led briefly by John Turner, in a historic landslide victory after Trudeau’s retirement.
“When I go back and look at the Mulroney stuff, I think I was tougher on Mulroney than I was on Trudeau,” Donato reflected.
Donato and Mulroney got on very well, he said, noting that the then-prime minister “loved my job,” even ordering the originals to be framed and hung in his offices, paid for out of the Conservative treasury, not the government, he explained.
Donato would eventually draw so many political cartoons that he had more than enough to fill 10 books.
His most memorable cartoon is a no-brainer.
Titled “The American Dream,” he took the iconic photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, but rotated it so that the American Marines looked like they were “shoving the flag up Ayatollah (Ruhollah) Khomeini’s butt.”
“That was in 1979 or 1980 for the Sunand won the award for the best editorial cartoon in the world in a contest,” he said proudly of the black and white drawing.
It got such a reaction that he remade it in color and it appeared on the cover.
Donato recently covered Canadian Dream, except it featured Canadian soldiers shoving the Canadian flag up US President Donald Trump’s butt.
He retired early in 1997 and continued drawing for the Sun as a freelancer until the beginning of this month, when he, in addition to the cartoonist Sue DewarThey were fired by the Sun Media network.
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| The Toronto SunSunday, September 6, 2026 |
Inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame, Donato received the National Newspaper Award for his editorial cartooning in 1976.
In 1985-86 he became the second Canadian to serve as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.
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