Bus Griffiths

Gilbert Joseph “Bus” Griffiths (1913 – September 25, 2006) was a cartoonist, lumberjack, and fisherman. He was best known for his graphic novel Now You’re Logging, published 1978 by Harbour Publishing. Now You’re Logging presented, in cartoon form, a complete look at the techniques, tools, and personalities of logging on the West Coast in the 1930s.

The Comics Journal said about the book in 1996: “a true anomaly: written and drawn by a man with decades of experience in the woods, it’s a book with no clear antecedent, more intent on documenting a way of life than telling a story”, adding “it might just change your perception of what comics are, what they can do, and why we need them.”

He began drawing cartoons while working as a logger, doing work for Vancouver’s Maple Leaf Publishing during World War II and comic strips about logging for BC Lumberman magazine. He retired from logging in 1961 and began work as a commercial fisherman. In 1972 he began work on Now You’re Logging to document logging in the era before modern technology. A complete picture is presented of the techniques and lives of the typical logger of the 1930s, with tree felling and log bucking, high climbers, chasers, choker setters, a hooktender, an accident and rescue in the woods, the use of the crosscut saw, rigging, a spar (tree), log transport on both truck and water, and operation of the steam donkey all shown and explained. This depiction of logging is interwoven with a love story involving one of the loggers and the daughter of a fishing family near their logging camp.