In personality and manner, Tom Toles and Mike Peters occupy opposite ends of the world of editorial cartoonists. If Toles, tall, reserved, arms folded, reminds you a bit of Gandalf, then Peters, manically perched at the edge of his seat, could be Pippin Took. But on Monday, May 17, as they spoke to a group of editorial page editors at Poynter, the gulf between them appeared far thinner than the gulf between them and their audience.
As the number of editorial cartoonists in America shrinks, some theorize the decline is caused by editors underestimating the value cartoonists bring to newspapers. Toles, who draws for The Washington Post, and Peters, who draws for the Dayton Daily News, spoke about that value, and about how editors can draw the best out of their cartoonists.
Tom Toles: Tempered by Time
By Molly Sinclair McCartney
Editorial Cartoon Archives:
• Tom Toles
• Mike Peters
“Cartoons are provocative by nature,” Toles told them. “Offending readers is not the problem.” But he cited a piece of advice he remembered hearing: “If you’re going to offend readers, do it on purpose.” He recommended well-targeted praise and criticism. Don’t just praise your cartoonist’s innocuous, inoffensive work, “don’t just try to sand down the edges,” he told the editors. Look for stuff that’s edgy, but excellent.
The artists also urged the editors to consider whether they show too much fear of controversy in their pages. “Newspapers are by far the lagging medium in terms of edginess,” Toles said. He pointed out that media consumers are turning to edgier sources of information, and suggested that newspapers risked being marginalized in that climate.
Peters described his understanding with his editor this way: “You can draw whatever you want. And we can print whatever we want.” In other words, don’t limit the artist’s ability to draw whatever’s on his or her mind, but be mutually aware that there’s a limit of what will get on the page.
One editor said she requested three different rough drafts daily from an artist less attuned to her limits, so she has a choice of what to publish. But more roughs might be more feasible for some artists than for others, Toles and Peters pointed out. Every cartoonist has a different system. Toles said he produces three or four roughs a day, while Peters said he regularly draws about 20. Each said he chose and submitted a sketch to his editors. And having that choice, Peters said, is important to him.
A few editors wondered aloud whether the lure of syndication was causing more and more cartoonists at local papers to focus their cartoons too much on national figures and issues. If I’m just going to get national cartoons, one editor mused, why not just use the syndicated cartoonists my paper subscribes to?
Good local topics for cartoons come in waves, said Peters. Cartoonists depend on audiences being already somewhat familiar with the subject of a cartoon to get the point, but readers don’t always follow local stories closely enough to gain that familiarity.
But when a good local story hits, Peters said, it can be much more exciting than a national story, because of the knowledge that a cartoon can have an impact. He told the story of drawing what he’d thought was a pretty moderate cartoon about a school principal. That day, he saw the man on the local news broadcast, holding up the strip in anger, saying, Can you believe they drew me like this?
It was great, Peters said. He drew the man again the next day.
Both men asked the editors to give their artists the same respect they would their writers. “You write, we draw,” Peters said. “Look at your cartoonists as columnists,” said Toles. Don’t put their cartoons in a different place every day, or take off their sigs, or publish them on an erratic schedule, if you wouldn’t do those things to one of your writers, he told the audience.
One of the editors proposed a different model — thinking of cartoonists not as columnists, as Toles described, but as the visual voices of the editorial board.
As the session came to a wrap, Toles mused about how much knowledge he’d had to absorb to become a successful editorial cartoonist. He recounted a memory from years ago, when he decided to start drawing: “I told my father I was going to be a political cartoonist. He said, ‘That’s great, but how can you be a cartoonist if you don’t know anything?'”
I guess that was before he won the Pulitzer Prize.
