Born in Truro, Nova Scotia, he grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. As a teenager Holmes taught himself to draw by copying comic-strip artists Wally Wood and Will Eisner. Harvey Kurtzman later published two of his drawings in Help! He married young and worked briefly as a sign painter. Holmes moved to Vancouver in 1969 and found work as an illustrator at The Georgia Straight, a weekly underground tabloid. He drew numerous covers for the publication and created the Harold Hedd comic strip, which ran in the paper during the early 1970s. Described by writer Dana Larsen as Holmes's "most well known cartoon creation", the one-page strip was collected in The Collected Adventures of Harold Hedd in 1972, with a smaller sized second volume in 1973.