Andy Donato

Andy Donato
Born	1937 Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Editorial cartoonist

Andy Donato (born 1937) is an editorial cartoonist and former art director for the Toronto Sun.

Donato was born in Scarborough, Ontario, to an Italian Canadian family. He graduated from Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute in 1955 and worked at Eaton's as a layout artist. He joined the Toronto Telegram in 1961, working as a graphic artist in the promotion department. In 1968, he was appointed art director and began cartooning on a part-time basis. After The Telegram folded in 1971, he joined The Toronto Sun. In 1974, he started cartooning full-time. In 1985 and 1986, he served as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

He is well known among Sun readers for his signature image of a bird, "Donato's bird." Finding the bird, lost in the newspaper, has been a common device in Sun promotions through the years.

Some of his most famous work was done when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was Prime Minister and Joe Clark was leader of the official opposition. As the two leaders battled it out, Donato lampooned both of them extensively. For years, Joe Clark was drawn wearing children's mittens (attached to his suit with strings), a reference to the time his luggage went missing on a trip to Israel. The final cartoon of the series appeared after Trudeau's airplane was hit by a bus while on the tarmac. It showed a puzzled Trudeau staring at the bus while one of his aides held up Clark's mittens and said: "We don't know who the driver was, but we found his mittens."

Donato's most famous cartoon, perhaps, was a blank cell titled "Canada's foreign ownership policy" - a parody of Canada's lack of controls over foreign ownership of Canadian companies.

Although Donato's work is mostly praised, he was criticized when his cartoon comparing David Miller with Adolf Hitler was published after Miller refused to allow a debate on Chief Julian Fantino's contract renewal.

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