Bus Griffiths' Now You're Logging: a graphic novel about British Columbia coastal logging in the 1930s.

A COMIC BOOK is an unlikely entree into the history of logging in coastal British Columbia, but Bus Griffiths' 1978 graphic novel Now You're Logging provides an intriguing window onto work in the woods in the 1930s. Griffiths worked for years as a logger on the coast, experiencing the camps of the 1930s directly. One of his prime aims was authenticity: he was tired of reading books on logging by people who had never spent any time in the woods. (1) Now You're Logging tells a story, replete with characters--who are, well, cartoonish--and romance, but it also takes the reader into the workplace, where skill, teamwork, and danger shape the daily lives of the men. Like Griffiths' other logging art, the book is an important historical document. The introduction to the first edition of the 119-page book was written by Daniel T. Gallacher, curator at the Provincial Museum of British Columbia: "It is not an overstatement to say that Bus Griffiths' works--both paintings and drawings--have become our most important resources for details on logging technology, activities, nomenclature and slang-terms--the knowledge of which is vital for a firm understanding of the forest industry in its formative years." (2)

Griffiths was born in Moose Jaw in 1913, moving with his family to the BC coast in 1922. By the 1930s he had given up office work and chosen to work in the forests. He kept logging until 1961, when he began commercial fishing out of Fanny Bay on Vancouver Island. At a young age he dreamed of becoming a cartoonist but local newspapers were not interested in his drawings. In the 1940s he conceived of recording logging history and telling logging stories in comic-book form, and a few of his works were published by Maple Leaf Publishing, a Vancouver firm. In the early 1970s he again took up the idea and the result was Now You're Logging.

The book captures a particular time and place in West Coast logging. The depression of the early 1930s, coupled with the American Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which largely shut Canadian lumber out of the US market, devastated the industry. However, recovery was around the corner. While the overall impact on the Canadian economy of the trade agreements reached in Ottawa at the Imperial Economic Conference in 1932 may have been "pathetically small," there was a dramatic impact on the British Columbia coastal lumber industry. The deal allowed Canadian lumber into the British market on favourable terms, and soon coastal operations were running full tilt servicing new customers. (3)