There’s such a good article about editorial cartooning today by cartoonist Rob Rogers in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette!
(Often articles like this are cleansed after a certain amount of time at newspaper sites, so I’m taking the liberty of quoting liberally from it here in the hopes that I can help keep some of this stuff floating around online for years to come.)
…as one of the Post-Gazette’s two editorial cartoonists, it is my job to push boundaries and make people think.
Editorial cartoonists are like visual op-ed columnists. They express their own opinion on pages designed to house a variety of opinions. There are liberal cartoonists and conservative cartoonists. Nobody would expect George Will to take a liberal viewpoint. He’s a conservative columnist who gets paid to express his conservative view. Yet I receive calls and letters all the time asking why I don’t draw something with a more conservative bent.
Yeah! how come you never hear about liberals bitching like this?
I am lucky to work for a paper with editors and a publisher who have an appreciation of the value of good, sometimes tough, editorial cartoons and the courage to use them. Not all newspapers are like that; not all readers are so well-served.
That is so true. Don’t forget, this paper has two, count ’em, two editorial cartoonists! You folks in Pittsburgh are damn lucky.
I love my job. I love getting out of bed and going to work everyday. (OK, the getting out of bed part isn’t fun, but the going to work is.) I get to spend my day filling a rectangular box with my opinion, humor and caricatures of newsworthy people (sometimes as a monkey). Some days I hope to be poignant. Other days I just hope to be funny. The best days are when I can be both.
Good stuff right? Go read the whole thing!
