The dog behind the curtain
I always wanted to be a cartoonist. And I am. But I’ve been a writer and an editor for three decades, too, and frankly, that’s what’s kept the kibble in the dog dish all these years.
If I’d had to depend on cartooning for a living, I’d have starved to death in the summer of 1977, shortly after graduating from the University of Northern Colorado with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Because while I went on to draw editorial cartoons for a number of newspapers, including The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, the Corvallis Gazette-Times in Oregon, and The Pueblo Chieftain in Colorado, they all insisted that I do something else, too, and plenty of it, if I wanted to get a weekly check with more than two digits on it.
So I’ve written hard news, features and commentary; spent many an evil night as a rim rat on one or another of a half-dozen copy desks, editing other people’s stories, writing headlines and laying out pages; and even scored a half-assed title from time to time, generally in lieu of a raise and normally prefaced with the word “assistant” — assistant news editor, assistant city editor, assistant sports editor, assistant features editor. I made it all the way to news editor once, at a chain of suburban weeklies in Denver, and finally quit newspapering altogether in 1991 after a brief stint as the features editor of The New Mexican in Santa Fe, where I edited copy, laid out pages, wrote about bicycle racing for the sports department, and, yes, drew cartoons.
After nearly 15 years with my scabby, drink-reddened nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, I came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and writing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, “Hey, look at me!” before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a retarded rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water.
And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, I get to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in “Marathon Man” and the highway department of your choice.
Feel free to peruse my pointless harangues at your leisure, but be advised that like the rest of the content on this site, they contain toxic quantities of disrespectful parody and rude satire certain to cause grievous harm to the humorless clots of tight-sphinctered ninnies whose breaking of wind only dogs can hear. Mad Dog Media neither sells nor installs senses of humor . . . we simply service them.
