The Canadian Bugs Bunny

Did you know a Canadian created Bugs Bunny?

I didn’t either.

We’re not talking about Charlie Thorson, the artist from Winnipeg who came up with the design for the goofy rabbit that Bugs Hardaway used in a cartoon he directed in the late 1930s. We’re talking about Les Barker.

Who?

We point to a portion of an article in the Montreal Gazette of March 31, 1954:

Cartoonist Stars Ruby Foo’s Show
An act with a new twist, a cartoonist who uses a projector on stage, has come to Ruby Foo’s Starlight Roof in the person of Les Barker.
Mr. Barker, the creator of Bugs Bunny, draws his cartoons rapidly and smoothly on the table of a small machine which projects the drawings on to a big screen behind and above the artist. He does not just confine himself to drawing figures from the film cartoons, but sketches local personalities and even members of the audience. By using a superimposed sheet for certain parts of his drawings he can make his cartoons move, usually to illustrate some gag he is pointing up.
In addition to his talents as a cartoonist, Mr. Barker also has considerable ability as a comedian. His patter is good, comical and friendly, and he makes full use of the standard stockpile of gags.

This item isn’t an isolated one. When Barker performed in theatres in the 1950s, newspaper ads proclaimed him either “Bugs Bunny cartoonist” or “creator of Bugs Bunny.”

This still doesn’t answer the question of who he was. Or what Bugs Bunny cartoons he worked on.

Well, he didn’t draw anything in the Hardaway cartoons or when he was redesigned and plunked into Tex Avery’s “A Wild Hare” in 1940. He wasn’t even in the United States then. In fact, he wasn’t Les Barker yet.

There’s information about him on various comic book sites on the web you can search, but here’s what we’ve divined from newspapers and other contemporary sources.

Barker was born Leo Henry Bachle in Toronto on November 23, 1922. A day after his 22nd birthday, he moved to the United States. His application for admission states he was on his way to join a friend living in Brooklyn. He was Jack Mendelsohn, who we can only presume was the artist and writer who worked in comics, animation and as a writer in live-action (he was one of gagmen on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In).

Bachle changed his name when he began touring in the early ‘50s doing his sketches on stage—and even on ice.

The Toronto Star of January 9, 1960 goes into a bit of his background and ambitions after returning to Canada around 1959.

LAND OF TV OPPORTUNITY
Cartoonist Comedian for Hire
By MORRIS DUFF
Sixteen years ago Toronto-born cartoonist Les Barker left for the land of opportunity—the U.S. to draw “Captain America” comic books and the Bugs Bunny movies.
Now Barker is looking to what he feels is a new land of opportunity for his particular talents—Toronto.
This city will soon have a new TV station, he reasons. From the beginning it must offer 45 per cent Canadian programming. Barker, like most people, feels this means talk and panel shows by the gallon.
Barker considers himself a good ad lib comedian. Years ago he gave up normal cartooning and now works the clubs with an act that keeps him talking and drawing at the same time.
Paar-Type Show
“What I have in mind is a Paar-type show except that I would draw pictures of guests as we chatted,” Barker explained. From working banquets in Toronto, Barker feels he knows tight rope walkers, mimics and other performers who are unknowns, have an interesting story and a good act.
Born on Seaton St. in Cabbagetown, Barker started out as a cartoonist drawing things like "The Brain,” “Thunderfist” and “Johnny Canuck” and for the black and white comic books that grew up in Toronto during World War II.
US comic book interests—always on the lookout for new talent—spotted Barker and took him to New York to work on “Captain America." That strip soon outsold “Superman,” Barker recalls.
"I also drew ‘Batman’ and ‘Captain Marvel’—what we called nightshirt characters in the trade.
“Those things all went in cycles. All of a sudden everybody quit reading the nightshirts and romance was the big thing. It died as suddenly and was replaced by crime comics. Then horror comics came along.
“The change would come for no reason at all. One day a person would have a stable of the biggest comic characters in the business. Overnight he wouldn't be making money.”
More Security
And this is one reason Barker turned to the night club circuit. Even it has more security than comic book drawing or working on the assembly lines that pour out movie cartoons.
At first he just told jokes and didn't use his art training Barker still considers his act primarily straight comedy, but feels the drawing gets that extra laugh that's so important sort.
“I’m sort of like Victor Borge using his piano as a prop."
Barker played the night club circuit from 1951 until a couple of years ago. In one club a group of gangsters walked in. Barker was warned he could draw the gangster leader and tell jokes about him, but to be careful.
"This guy looked more like a chimpanzee than a man. He had big bushy eyebrows and a monkey mouth.
“I was afraid he would take offence if I accentuated his bad looks so I did the reverse and drew a picture of Tyrone Power. I knew that was risky too, but I thought less dangerous.
"After the show he called me over and asked if considered the drawing a good likeness. I told him I thought so but one of his henchmen interrupted to say I made him too good looking.
“The leader wheeled around and slugged the guy right across the teeth. ‘I’m much more handsome than this picture,’ the leader said.
“If I'd drawn him straight he'd have had me tossed in the river."
Barker gave up night clubs because he covered playing banquets is more profitable. His routine is to go to a city and through contacts made in the clubs, get a few jobs.
Word is soon passed among agents that a good fresh entertainer is in town. Jobs come in until the circuit is worked out. The Barker moves.
He hopes the banquet circuit in Toronto will hold together through most of 1960. By then Toronto's new TV magnate should be chosen.

The TV station in question was CFTO-TV, which signed on December 31, 1960. I’ve found no evidence his dream of a talk-art show materialised. The Star reported on May 31, 1962 he had opened an after-hours club on Yonge Street. The same paper revealed in its issue the following November 19th the club had closed because it couldn’t get a liquor license. Barker went back on the road with his act in southwestern Ontario. He claimed to the Star that Screen Gems was “interested in a television games show idea” he had come up with.

If anyone has any evidence he went to the Warner Bros. studio work on “movie cartoons,” you’re welcome to pass it along. Eminent Canadian writer Pierre Berton explained the “Bugs creation” claim in his Star column of May 2, 1962:

One of his [Barker’s] lasting contributions to art was his new characterization of Bugs Bunny, whose face he changed considerably from its motion picture image when Bugs appeared as a comic book figure. As a result, Barker says, the movie image began to change, too, so that the Bugs Bunny you see today is partly Barker’s creation. It was all done for the sake of quicker drawing, natch.

Later newspaper ads plugging his appearances said he was “direct from Europe,” “formerly with the Mickey Rooney Show” and “well known having performed at the Beverly Hills Motor Hotel.” Oh, and he was still “the original creator of the Bugs Bunny cartoon” (Brantford Expositor, Aug. 14, 1970). In 1974, the Niagara Falls Review told readers he was now a “psycho-graphologist,” giving lectures to schools, club meetings and police departments under the sponsorship of Bic Pen of Canada, that he analysed handwriting of inmates at the Kingston Pen, had appeared in a movie called Class of 44 and was soon to be seen in another Canadian feature, 225 Rooms of Comfort. He continued performing in Ontario until the end of the ‘80s; some of his events were for charity.

By 1990, he had moved to Miami, but soon returned to the Toronto area. When he became hospitalised, he spent his time generously entertaining his fellow patients. His death was reported in the May 13, 2003 edition of the National Post.

My thanks to Steven Thompson for the idea for this post.