Cartoonist

A cartoonist is a visual artist who creates cartoons, and may both write and draw comics. The work often uses simplified forms, exaggeration, humour or satire to tell a story or comment on current events.

In the half-century between April 1964 and April 2013, only one issue of Mad magazine was published without new material by cartoonist Al Jaffee.

Jaffee signing in 2008 by Oiseau

Before taking up acting, actor Martin Landau began working as a staff cartoonist for the New York Daily News at the age of 17. He stayed for about five years and also worked on the comic strip The Gumps.

Mort Walker did not invent familiar cartoon symbols, but he coined or popularised playful names for many of them. In 1964 he introduced “grawlix” for typographical symbols used in place of profanity; his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana also catalogued “squeans” for marks indicating intoxication, dizziness or illness, and “indotherms” for wavy lines representing steam or heat.

The modern use of the word “cartoon” for a humorous or satirical drawing dates from 1843, when Punch applied it to John Leech’s “Cartoon No. 1: Substance and Shadow.” The joke played on the older meaning of a cartoon as a full-size preparatory design for a work of art.

The Washington Post cartoonist Herbert “Herblock” Block coined the word “McCarthyism” in a political cartoon published on March 29, 1950. The drawing showed Republican leaders pushing their party’s elephant towards a platform made from a tar barrel labelled “McCarthyism.”

Before becoming famous for his children’s books, Dr Seuss worked as chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM from 1941 to 1943. He produced more than 400 editorial cartoons for the paper, many addressing the Second World War.

The first Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was awarded in 1922 to Rollin Kirby of the New York World for “On the Road to Moscow,” a drawing about the famine in Russia.

In 1992, Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.