Political cartooning might seem like it would fall somewhere between astronaut and rock star in a young man’s pantheon of possible vocations, but Tom Toles was dragged into it kicking and screaming.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, who will be honored Tuesday with the Herblock Prize (named for the legendary late cartoonist Herb Block, whose post Toles took over at The Washington Post in 2002), was initially more interested in rendering social angst of the early 1970s with elaborate three-dimensional illustrations.
He had spent his undergraduate days at the University at Buffalo doing them for the student newspaper, The Spectrum — launch pad of the journalistic careers of Posties such as Jo-Ann Armao and Howard Kurtz (now with The Daily Beast). During his senior year, Toles showed his illustrations to the editor of the now-defunct Buffalo Courier-Express, Douglas Turner.
Turner hired him part time as a caricature artist and, after a few months, started nudging him toward editorial cartoons.
“I said ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” Toles recalled. “‘I don’t have the skills. I don’t have the interest. I don’t have the knowledge.’ That seems like a pretty good case, right? Three disqualifiers.”
But Turner wanted him to try it anyway, so he did. “I kept trying to get out of it. Hated it. Just hated it. And I was pretty bad, in my opinion. But he just kept at it and at it and at it.”
Toles enacts his reluctance by slouching his six-foot, three-inch frame down into one of the chairs normally used by visitors to his large office overlooking 15th Street, previously occupied by Herblock, until he is nearly horizontal.
Turner pushed because he saw something special in the young artist.
“He had a political consciousness, and he just saw through all the crap,” Turner said. “He had the moral strength. A regional newsroom, especially, needs moral validity to rise up out of the commonplace. You need leadership, and he was just the stuff of leadership.”
By Toles’s telling, he arrived at this place very slowly, both artistically and politically, over the next few years, stripping the realism and density out of his drawing and coming up with a more cartoony style influenced by Pat Oliphant in structure and Jules Feiffer in tone.
His real breakthrough came when the Courier-Express was bought by the Cowles Media Company in 1979, and the approval process for editorial cartoons fundamentally changed. Whereas before Toles had submitted a stack of sketches to his bosses and had them pick the one he would do, his new bosses wanted him to pick the best idea himself.
“All of a sudden the content of what was going into these [sketches] changed completely,” he said. “I was amazed at how much I had been tailoring. I didn’t do anything I didn’t believe in, but it was ‘What can I do within this framework that’s actually going to get in the paper?’ So then it changed a lot. I started doing what I wanted to do.”
There was an initial outcry from readers — “One day, every single letter in the paper was a condemnation of me. Every single one.” — but the publisher stood by him. “He said, ‘Just keep doing what you are doing,’ and it’s been that way ever since.”
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