By Aaron Spitzer

It’s been about 25 years since I read a comic book, but this past week I’ve been poring over Skookum’s North, by Whitehorse’s Doug Urquhart. The book came out back in 1994 and was the first collection of Urquhart’s Paws comic strips, which depict the misadventures of Skookum the sled dog and his master, the bush-savvy trapper Marten Fisher.

Paws ran in newspapers across Northern Canada and Alaska from 1983 until, I think, sometime in the 1990s. I knew of it, but had never paid much attention to it until now. As a social analysis of life in the North, it’s pretty brilliant. There are strips about shoeless Northern cocktail parties, the monk-like patience required to wait for the arrival of a bushplane, annual springtime hippie influxes, the irrelevance of “best before” dates in Northern grocery stores, the ephemerality of winter romances, and more.

What I like best about Paws, though, is it makes a real attempt to create a true pan-Northern sensibility. The strip isn’t based in any specific state or territory – it portrays a sort of “everyNorth” that allows readers from Labrador to the Aleutians to nod their heads and go, “Yep, this speaks to my life.” In this, Urquhart is pretty unique. And it’s no big surprise – he’s lived everywhere from northern Quebec to Fort Smith, NWT to Atlin, B.C., and has done nearly every bush job imaginable, from prospector to biologist to weather observer.

Some of the Paws strips fall short, but others are pure genius. They bear witness to our lives up here. If you’re a Northerner, or want to know how a Northerner thinks, you need to check them out.