The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
I started getting into trouble for drawing cartoons in the first grade. And sharing them with the person next to me whose snickering would always invite a crackdown.
I’ve been essentially doing the same thing nearly daily for the past six decades.
I’ve been meeting cartooning deadlines since I was 13, on the staff of the “The Tumbleweed,” the Naylor Middle School yearbook. At Rincon High School, I drew for the “Rincon Echo,” then for the underground paper, the “Frumious Bandersnatch,” then the “Arizona Daily Wildcat” with side trips to “The Pretentious Idea” and the “Tombstone Epitaph.”
After earning my degree in graphic design, it was the “Oklahoma City Times” and the “Daily Oklahoman,” then onto Chesapeake Bay to work for the “Virginian-Pilot/Ledger Star,” followed by the “Daily Press of Newport News.” At age 30, “The Arizona Daily Star” hired me, and after years of shameless begging I returned home, elated.
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After a lifetime of drawing cartoons I have fallen in love with writing. I have fallen out of love with cartooning. After 11,000 cartoons, plus the tens of thousands of caricatures I have drawn over the years, I do not want to spend my remaining years manacled to a drawing board perpetually haunted by deadlines.
By the way, if you have an easel-sized caricature I drew of you framed in your house, email me a pic at tooner@tucson.com. I’d like to see what became of them.
In my 66th year, my pen has grown as heavy as a boulder, and my cartoon deadlines have become a yoke. Thus I am gliding into blissful semi-retirement by reducing my output to one cartoon a week. And one column a week.
Sweet deal. An 8-day work month.
I hope you will appreciate and understand my Django euphoria about escaping the grinding grind. Last Saturday was my first without deadlines looming in four decades. It was heavenly. And Sunday? The same gift of time. Time to marvel at my 6-year-old grandson sketching a perfectly proportioned linear caricature of Donald Trump, nailed in 11 lines. Time for the next Arroyo Cafe Radio Show. Time for reviving the Sweat Lodge Comedy troupe. Time for projects, fitness, travel, novels and art.
In an age when political cartoonists like Tom Toles, Mike Thompson and Signe Wilkinson are saying goodbye, I am one of fewer than 15 editorial cartoonists retaining an American pulpit in this present Age of Madness, and this satirist thanks you.
I learned to love satire where every young social protest artist learns to love drawing. The bathroom stall at Myers Elementary school. Fourth grade. Nixon as a devil. Unsigned.
I remember projecting cartoon slides from “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” with my Kenner GIVE-A-SHOW projector on the ceiling over my bed at night, studying the cartoons of Hanna-Barbera as if they were the works of Michelangelo.
When I was 10, Mom caught me tracing the ladies in a “Frederick’s of Hollywood” lingerie ad on the back of her Photoplay magazine. Anatomical studies, mom.
When I showed mom my sketches for super hero costumes she showed me her ancient sketches of hat designs for Depression-era movie stars she had drawn when she was a little girl. Good steady hand. Definite line work.
The Master Sergeant would charm me by patiently sketching a bucolic autumn scene on any nearby scrap of paper. Three haystacks in a field. A tree’s autumn leaves drifting in front of an October moon. Ghosts dancing around a phantom campfire with teepees in the distance. Pop’s Eden. Draw it again, pop.
Writing this, I am wearing my favorite T-shirt featuring the classic World War II cartoon by Bill Mauldin of a sorrowful American G.I. putting down his lame jeep with his pistol, like a good cowboy ending his beloved companion’s misery. Perhaps this cartoonist is doing the same thing in a sense.
Mauldin drew in the Ashcan manner of political cartooning like Herblock, the Washington Post giant. When I was 13, I sent Herbert Block some of my cartoons. He graciously hand-lettered an encouraging response and so I set my sights on cartooning, inspired by the cartoonists of the seventies like Jeff MacNelly and Pat Oliphant, artists inspired by “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and “Mad Magazine.”
This kid from Craycroft and 27th never imagined doodling in the back of the class would take him to International Cartooning forums or to the White House-let alone to Paris, as a guest of France, or that his cartoons, drawn with felt tip markers on cheap typing paper, would be displayed at the Museum of Tolerance in Mexico City or would hang in a show at the Norman Rockwell Museum.
I was pretty certain the principal’s office was as I far as I was going to get.
Every Saturday, this columnist will be looking out for you. And every Sunday I promise I will transport you to the back of the classroom. And when the teacher isn’t looking I’ll whisper, “psst” and pass a cartoon across the aisle, to you, in hopes we both get into trouble.
Thanks for supporting our mission by being a part of our Arizona Daily Star family.
See you every weekend. In my beloved Arizona Daily Star.
