My favorite part of the paper (I read 7 on a daily basis) has been the cartoons, particularly the editorial cartoons.
Doonesbury has long been a favorite, but I also enjoy Bramhall
(New York Daily News) and Mike Luckovich (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and several others.
https://www.gocomics.com/bill-bramhall
https://www.gocomics.com/mikeluckovich
When we moved to Arizona, I discovered Steve Benson, who spent
most of his career with the Arizona Republic until parent company Gannett
forced his layoff in 2019. At that point, he started to draw cartoons for the
Freedom from Religion Foundation
Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Steve Benson to draw for FFRF -
Freethought Today
Shortly after that, he then wound up with the Arizona Mirror,
but he recently announced his retirement (he turned 70 on January 2)
Benson
was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, was a Pulitzer
finalist in 1984, 1989, 1992, and 1994, and has received a variety of
other awards.[ He has served as president of
the Association of American Editorial
Cartoonists[ His cartoons have been collected in a
number of books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Benson_(cartoonist)
Like many editorial cartoonists, he has generated some controversy
over the years.
In the late 1980s he was at first a supporter, then a prominent critic,
of Evan Mecham, the first Mormon to be elected governor of Arizona.
Benson's criticism stirred controversy among Arizona's Mormon population, leading
some LDS Church members to seek the intervention of Benson's grandfather in the
matter. In the midst of the scandal, Governor Mecham telephoned Benson and
told him to stop drawing critical cartoons about him, or his eternal soul would
be in jeopardy.
In 1993 Benson faced further controversy within the LDS Church, when he
stated that his grandfather, then nearing his 94th birthday, was suffering
from senility that was being concealed by
church leadership, Later that year, Benson publicly left the church.
He has since become a critic of religious belief, appearing at Freedom
From Religion Foundation's annual conventions and stating in its
paper Freethought Today, "If, as the true believers claim, the word
'gospel' means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel,
other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a
freethinking human being, I have come not to favor or fear religion, but to
face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement.
In 1997, a Benson cartoon used the image of a firefighter carrying a dead
child to comment on the death sentence that had just been imposed on Oklahoma City bombing defendant Timothy McVeigh. Benson forcefully defended
his work against some readers' contentions that the cartoon was insensitive.
In 1999, Benson released a political cartoon titled "Texas Bonfire
Traditions." In the cartoon, he compared the 1999 Aggie
Bonfire collapse to the Waco siege of 1993 and the murder of James
Byrd Jr. in 1998. This prompted negative reactions and
criticism from Texas A&M, and forced The Arizona Republic to remove the
cartoon.
I wrote about cartoons a little more than 5 years ago, but my closing
paragraph still applied today.
“We all receive far too much news on a daily basis, so it’s
refreshing to note that we will always have the comic strips to take us in a
more enjoyable direction, even it is only for a few minutes a day.”
So long, Steve.
We’ll miss you.
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