I drew for my college paper for a while, but then I kind of got sidetracked. Basically what happened was, I got thrown out of school. I was caught throwing shit off the tenth floor of the dorm. (Laughs.) And also I failed like half of my classes two semesters in a row and I was the editor of an underground newspaper that had pornography in it. (Laughs.) This all happened sort of simultaneously and they kicked me out. And that same summer, I got arrested in Massachusetts with my stupid wanker roommate who was a pothead, for possession of pot. It was his, but it was in the car and I was driving, so I got busted too. Then I got really depressed and in a funk, and I didn't do anything. That was in 1984. And from like '84 to '87, I didn't do a thing. No cartoons.

I had so much debt it was incredible. I owed money to everyone. I mean, like it took me forever to pay a Con Ed bill of $286--I remember that. And I was basically just starving, and I couldn't even begin to think about cartoons. I mean they say that you have to be miserable to be an artist, but the truth is that there has to be a certain level of comfort to be an artist, otherwise you really can't focus. And so that's where I was. I had fallen below that level of comfort. So I ended up just trying to survive, and I just worked.

In 1987, my depression sort of lifted and I started drawing cartoons again, just for my own pleasure. And then this strange thing happened--I met Keith Haring, the artist, in the subway--and I was telling him how frustrated I was. And he goes, "Well, why don't you go public the way I started, you know? Like, put your shit up in public?" At the time, I had this job at a large bank, so I started using their Xerox to make like seven hundred copies of my cartoons every week. And I plastered them on lamp posts on Broadway from 110th Street all the way down to 42nd Street and all over midtown.

I did that every Monday night for years. After a while, I started putting my P.O. box on the bottom, and people would write and say, "Hey, I want to use your cartoons in my poetry review." I got like twelve really tiny clients this way. Then in 1990, I went back to college--I guess they'd lost my discipline file because they let me in--and I started doing cartoons for the school paper again. And during that period, I got a call from a small syndicate, Chronicle Features, and they were like, "Hey, we want to give you a try." I was amazed. You know, like totally blown away. Because I had been through the ringer, and I had given up on ever being mainstream at all. And they told me that they wanted to try to syndicate me. I was like crying, you know?

Every cartoonist wants to be syndicated. It's the only way to make a living at it. Syndication means you have this company that goes around and sells your cartoons to publications. The syndicate takes half of the money. It's good for the cartoonist because these syndication companies have contacts with the publications that you don't have. However, syndication rates absolutely suck. It's a buyer's market big time. I mean, I do three cartoons a week and a large daily paper typically pays about $30 a week for me. A small paper pays maybe $8 a week. Those are the rates and they're the same for every political cartoonist--whether you're extremely famous or just starting out. It really blows. You have to have a lot of papers subscribing to get by.

Anyway, I signed up with Chronicle Features for five years. The first two of those, they only sold me to like about twenty daily papers. Some of them were pretty big, like the L.A. Times, but it was a small list. I couldn't exactly quit my day job. And then, in 1995, things really busted out for me. It was like suddenly I started getting more clients. And then I switched to Universal, which is a bigger syndication company. And since then, things have been pretty good.

My contract says that every week I have to send in three cartoons, seven and a half inches high by ten inches wide. And that's pretty much all it says--I can draw whatever I want. So all I do is I read the newspaper, talk to my friends, watch the TV, and I try to get ideas of things that I'm angry about or that I think are funny. Then I draw them out in ink on regular paper, scan them into a computer where I add shading and special effects, and then I e-mail them to the syndicate. It's really freeform.

The best thing by far about my job is the fact that you can just have this brain fart and commit it on paper, and you send it out to like two hundred newspapers and some of them will print it. (Laughs.) Like this week, I saw an ad on television called "Hooked on Math," which is by the "Hooked on Phonics" people. And I don't know why, but it got me going. I drew this cartoon that starts with this little kid saying, "I don't like math, you can't make me do it!" And then it's an ad for "Hooked on Brutality." (Laughs.) It's like, "Do you have this problem? With Hooked on Brutality for $99 we'll tell you how to kick your kid's ass." (Laughs) And the joke is that throughout the cartoon, the guy, the father is beating the shit out of his son to make him learn math. And each frame he's like using a more complicated equation. And like, by the end he's like Stephen Hawking in the wheelchair. And he's like, "You can become like me. A well-paid, psychopathic geek." My wife saw this cartoon, and she was laughing, but she says, "You know, a lot of people are going to be very puzzled." But the great thing about my job is I can say, fuck them. (Laughs.) I can draw whatever I want.

I did another cartoon this week that was more typical--more of a spin on the news. Richard Gephardt, who's running for President in 2000, gave a really good speech for the first time in his life recently. He said all Clinton does is nibble around the edges of big issues--everything he's ever done is small. And I thought that was pretty accurate, so I did this cartoon where Clinton's defending himself. He's like, "Well, I do little issues, but they're important--like you may blame me for having flubbed the national health care thing, but maybe you missed my anti-ragweed initiative in 1994." And stuff like that. Just making fun of the President of the United States. (Laughs.) I enjoy that.

That's not to say it's easy to do these things. Cartooning can be pretty fucking hard. I mean, you're trying to make people laugh, and at the same time that you're trying to express a political point of view--and it has to look good. And you have to make things work in a very constricted space. And you have to use very, very few words as shorthand for complex ideas. Most of the cartoonists I know sweat blood out of their forehead trying to produce a good cartoon. I can't even really explain to my wife what I do. I'm totally zoned out at the end of the day because I've thrown so much shit into my cartoon. She'll come home and start talking about something like a bill or something, and I'll be like, "Don't bother me, woman."

Unfortunately, most political cartoonists today are about making stupid jokes about current events. You know? The profession has gotten away from the ideal set by Thomas Nast, who's like the patron saint of political cartooning. Nast's idea was that you comforted the afflicted and you afflicted the comfortable. I don't know if Nast actually said that or if it was Mark Twain, but Nast talked about it and it's a true thing. I think you are supposed to defend the poor, the downtrodden, the handicapped, people who are being fucked with for whatever reason. And you should go after the authorities. And political cartooning has gotten away from that.

For instance, with the latest saber rattling with Iraq, I am ashamed of how many of my peers have done stupid "Sadaam Hussein is a bad man" cartoons. You know how fucking embarrassing that is? It's like they're just towing the company line. I mean, maybe Sadaam Hussein is a bad man, maybe he's not, but no one needs cartoons to tell them that. It's like totally redundant.

The sad thing is there probably won't be political cartoons in this country in twenty years because there's no money in it. The syndication rates are so low, no newcomer can make a living doing them. Political cartooning is actually doomed. It's a dying art. Me and Tom Tomorrow are, like, the last generation. We are the only people our age doing this. Everybody else is like much older. We're the last of the Mohicans. Tom's thirty-six. I'm thirty-four. We've squeaked in under the door. And we're it. There's no one younger than us. And I don't think there will be.

Still, what do I know? I consider myself a lucky son of a bitch just to be here. I mean, I spent a solid eight years of my life just basically spending all my time working toward the day that I would be able to do this for a living. And now the payoff is that I'm not really working. I mean, it's not really a job. It's fun. I would do it anyway even if I wasn't paid. And I've had real jobs. I've driven a cab. I've scrubbed dishes at Friendly's. I've done horrible filing-clerk shit, all sorts of fucking terrible work. No one tells me what to do. This is a great job. It's the best job in the world. You know, it's like a scam that you get to do this for a living. It's a joke.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

TO ARCHIVE