On September 6, 2026, Andy Donato closed out his final cartoon for the Toronto Sun, a farewell to readers after 55 years at the paper he had helped shape from its very first issue. He died nine days later, on September 15, 2026, at the age of 89, according to the Daily Cartoonist, the trade publication that had profiled his retirement barely a week earlier. For 65 years, across two Toronto newspapers, Donato was one of Canadian journalism's most durable editorial cartoonists.

He began his newspaper career in 1961 as a staff artist at the Toronto Telegram, moonlighting for a time at the weekly Bramalea Guardian. His first political cartoon, on the Canadian flag debate then consuming Ottawa, ran in 1964 and was later reprinted in the Encyclopedia Americana; he recalled his editor's reaction simply as, "Oh, good, I can run that," according to the Daily Cartoonist. He also drew a weekly comic panel called Flunko from 1964 to 1966, which was picked up by newspapers in the United States.

Donato joined the newly launched Toronto Sun just after Thanksgiving weekend in 1971, hired initially as a part-time political cartoonist and as the artist who helped design the paper's original masthead. His workload grew with the paper: two cartoons a week became three, then five by 1973, once the Sun added a Sunday edition. "The part that interests me the most is reading the news, hearing a story, and then trying to do something satirical on that story," he said in an interview with the Toronto Sun, via Yahoo News Canada, in the days before his retirement.

Around 1984, a small bird began appearing in the corner of his drawings. "I just happened to draw it in a tree I was doing as a cartoon. And I kind of liked it, so I kept drawing it," he said. The bird stayed for the rest of his career and became as familiar to Sun readers as his political caricatures themselves.

National recognition came early: a National Newspaper Award for editorial cartooning in 1976, and a Montreal Salon of Cartoons international prize for "The American Dream," named the world's best editorial cartoon in the 1979-80 competition. He served as president of both the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and the Association of Canadian Cartoonists in 1985 and 1986, and the Sun named him Corporate Art Director in 1993. He also received the Metropolitan Toronto Police force's annual news award for cartooning that year and again in 1997, according to a Canadian News Hall of Fame profile of his career.

Donato stepped back from his staff position at the Sun in 1997 but kept drawing as a contract cartoonist for nearly three more decades. Honors kept arriving: the Italian Walk of Fame in 2014, and, alongside journalist John Fraser, induction into the Canadian News Hall of Fame at a Toronto gala in 2016. Two years later, the Scarborough Walk of Fame gave him a star. He once summed up the trade by comparing a cartoonist to a blind javelin thrower, someone who doesn't get much recognition but still commands the crowd's attention.

Cartooning was not his only art. Donato painted landscapes and Toronto streetscapes in a style he called Bent Realism, exhibiting in numerous solo shows in cities including Toronto, London, New York and Johannesburg, and publishing 11 books collecting his cartoons.

What endures is specific: six and a half decades of political caricature across two Toronto newspapers, the masthead he helped design when the Sun launched in 1971, a trademark bird that generations of readers learned to look for in the margins of his drawings, and canvases of Toronto streets and skylines that he kept painting long after his cartooning day was done. He worked almost to the very end, filing his final cartoon on September 6, 2026, nine days before he died.