From the beginning of written language and experiments with imagery, humans have been doing political art. Wall graffiti from ancient Pompeii included verbal and graphic complaints and caricatures of local politicians, crooked merchants and the inequities of daily life. From a fire blackened stick, to brush, to pencil and pen, to spray paint and now iPad, humans have wielded whatever tools of self-expression were at hand to challenge corrupt autocracy, official pretension, ridicule political pomposity and raise a ruckus.

While empires come and go and leaders dominate headlines only to disappear a day after their obituary, the themes of discontent are consistent across the bumpy, twisting arc of humanity. Given that power corrupts, it is also safe to say political cartoonists, humorists and satirists will always have work to do as politicians serve up platters of material daily.

You can check out some other background I have posted on American political cartooning on the “Inky Trail” page.

I began my political cartooning career at The Walworth Times (WI) weekly newspaper. I was hired to paste up ads and news copy and process film in the dark room in the pre-computer scissors-and-glue-pot days of newspaper layout. The editor, Fred Noer Sr., knew I was interested in cartooning and generously offered me $10 for a weekly cartoon on pretty much any subject I wanted to address, which gave me material for the beginning of an essential portfolio of published work.

Every three or four months I would take my recent work to Bill Sanders, the long-time cartoonist at the old (generally progressive) Milwaukee Journal for a critique. Tom Curtis, the cartoonist at the (generally conservative) Milwaukee Sentinel, would join us in Bill’s office and the two of them would give me a no-holds-barred critique. While no gentle experience, it was just what I needed. After a year of this, Bill one day positioned a half-dozen small cartoons I had done for a recent freelance project in the middle of his drawing table and announced: “Those are your first professional cartoons.”

A Nobel Prize couldn’t feel better than what Bill gave me that day.

Rise and bruising fall

One day Fred Noer called me out of the ad layout room into his office to say he had the editor of The Albuquerque Tribune on the phone who wanted to know if I was interested in a full-time cartooning gig at a daily newspaper. Within a couple months I was relocated to New Mexico and publishing six editorial page cartoons a week and other illustration work. My work had some small syndication and I would do occasional freelance work, including for the National Wildlife Federation and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen. (Ralph once told a group we were with that I was, “The best pro bono cartoonist in America!” Still can’t figure out if that was a compliment or not!)

My cartooning career came to a bruising end when the work I was doing on Ronald Reagan’s Central American dirty wars began to be rejected. After a half-dozen years of success and good relations with my editors, cartoon after cartoon on all topics were rejected – often brutally.