After 50 years of drawing and publishing a half-dozen political cartoons a week, 52 weeks a year, through 11 presidential administrations, well, that will get you some enemies. Paul Conrad should know.
This staff cartoonist for the LA Times was honored to be put on Nixon's famed hate list. He has received death threats and political heat, but in the end, it was a corporate change in the newspaper business that shut him--and many other staff cartoonists--down, but not out.
According to Chris Lamb, author of Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons (Columbia University Press, 2004), the state of the political cartoonist is dependent on the artists' adaptation to new media outlets:
The future of cartooning is tied to the future of newspapers. If either
is
going to survive, they’ll need to successfully make the transition to
new media. The Internet makes it possible to see dozens of editorial
cartoons every day on sites such as PoliticalCartoons.com, EditorialCartoonists.com and CagleCartoons.com.
The Internet gives newspapers the opportunity to embrace television’s
traditional strengths of strong graphics and instantaneous news, but
the Internet is still a loss leader for newspapers.
From the documentary on Conrad by Independent Lens:
Brilliant, prolific and always unafraid, Paul Conrad has brought more
than five decades’ worth of American presidents under the scrutiny of
his pen. Beginning with Harry S. Truman, Conrad’s scathing artistic
commentary has left no administration—or political issue—untouched. His
cartoons in the Los Angeles Times
commented on the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Reaganomics, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the Iran Contra Affair, as
well as more recent newsworthy items such as the Iraq war and the
Patriot Act, to the delight and scorn of generations of readers. As
fellow cartoonist Mike Keefe notes, “If you’re not pissing people off
in your cartoons, you’re not doing the job.”
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