TITUS, Doris Slater

Doris Slater Titus

Doris Mildred Titus (nee Slater) was born outside Chatham, Ontario in 1917. She attended the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) on scholarship and focused on commercial art, later graduating in 1939. In 1941, she began illustrating comic books for Anglo-American Publications. The drawings for her first comic, “Penny’s Diary,” made her the first woman comic book artist in Canada. In 1954, Titus moved to Brantford, Ontario and was hired as an art teacher at Brantford Collegiate Institute. During this time, she founded the Sketch Club at Glenhyrst Gardens (now Glenhyrst Art Gallery), participated in exhibitions, and befriended artist Toni Onley. Her experiments with abstract painting led to the use of unconventional mediums like her own bathwater. Titus left Brantford for Ottawa in 1960 to teach at the Ottawa High School of Commerce. Tragically, she died in an automobile accident in June, 1964 at the age of 47. For her contributions to the Canadian comic book industry, she was inducted into the Shuster Awards Hall of Fame for Canadian comic book creators in 2015. Her work resides in several private collections in Canada and England, and in the permanent collection of Glenhyrst Art Gallery.