'The Druid'.
Peter Bruce is a British cartoonist based in Ireland, who created the newspaper strip 'The Druid' (1969-1975) for The Irish Times. He also worked with Eiso Toonder as a scriptwriter for the Dutch-Irish comic strip 'De Goeroe' ('The Guru', 1970-1980).
Life and career
Peter Bruce was born in 1942 in Kenya as the son of a Scottish father and an English mother. In 1950, the family moved to the United Kingdom, where Peter got his formal education. After college, he got a job as a travel courier in France, where he met his first wife, Patricia. In 1969, the couple moved to Ireland, where they got married and settled in the Dublin area. Peter Bruce spent his professional life working in the office equipment business, first as a salesman, then as a manager.
The Druid
In his spare time, Bruce was making his own cartoons, including a philosophical and satirical comic strip called 'The Druid'. Through a friend, he was introduced to Douglas Gageby, the editor of The Irish Times newspaper. Gageby liked Bruce's 'Druid' comic strip, and ran it in the Times for a period of six years, from 1969 to 1975.
'The Druid'.
The Guru
About a year after the launch of 'The Druid', Peter Bruce was approached by Eiso Toonder, an Ireland-based comic scriptwriter from the Netherlands and the son of legendary Dutch comic author Marten Toonder. For several years, Peter Bruce assisted Eiso Toonder on the development of his comic strip 'The Guru' (1970-1980), about a spiritual leader who never gives people the answers they expect. Written by Eiso Toonder, with many gags submitted by Peter Bruce, the panels were cut-and-pasted together from stock drawings made by Marten Toonder and his co-workers Piet Wijn and Terry Willers. The strip appeared in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and from 1985 to 1988 also in The Irish Times. The feature was credited to "Peter Abel", a pen name that Eiso Toonder later attributed to the non-existent novelist Cees Abel and artist Peter Hoye. In reality, the "Peter" in Peter Abel was most likely his co-writer, Peter Bruce.
Other cartooning work
In addition to working on two comic strips, Peter Bruce has also contributed many individual cartoons to The Phoenix Magazine in Dublin. In the 2000s, Peter Bruce revived his 'Druid' strip on the website thedruidcartoon.com, posting updated versions of his original cartoon series.
'The Druid'.