The Daily Routine

KENT WORCESTER: Tell us about a typical day. Do you start things off by watching television?

JEFF DANZIGER: I usually start by listening to the BBC on WNYC, or Imus or...

WORCESTER: Howard Stern?

DANZIGER: I don't listen to Howard Stern and I don't know why. Howard Stern is not as political as Imus usually is, although Howard says he's against Bush now.

WORCESTER: He's taken a political turn.

DANZIGER: I think that's wise, given his problems with the FCC, but as soon as the election is over, he'll go right back to jokes about lesbians. Howard Stern is sometimes funny and he can be outrageous, but I don't look to him for inspiration.

WORCESTER: What are you looking for, a phrase?

DANZIGER: From the business point of view, I'm looking to get out ahead of the news. By the time the news story breaks and spreads across the country in what we now laughably call the news cycle, I will already have something there. My editors, who are then dealing with the column that follows the news, will put the column and the cartoon together and that's how you get on the page.

WORCESTER: Are you always on the editorial page, or do sometimes people put you on the cartoon page?

DANZIGER: I am almost always on the op-ed page. Usually what they do is, a story breaks on Monday, a columnist sits down, writes it, sends it out, an editor takes it, puts the column and a cartoon on the same subject next to it, and that's how they make up the package.

WORCESTER: Let's say you do nine cartoons in a particular week. How many of those will have to do, let's say in this election cycle, on national politics? All of them?

DANZIGER: That would be a bad idea. Sometimes it happens, more in an election year, but I would try to do at least one or two on street-level American life.

WORCESTER: Consumers, Wal-Mart, overweight people?

DANZIGER: Hopefully not that. Maybe even sports, as it changes seasonally, the economy, cars.

WORCESTER: Do you do celebrities? Paris Hilton?

DANZIGER: Not Paris Hilton, but last week I had one where a bunch of Republicans were sitting in a restaurant and they had been given plastic cups so that they could throw them at Linda Ronstadt. The waitress said "If you're Republican, we give you plastic cups." I don't know whether that's political, or what.

WORCESTER: There is one theme you have a special affinity for: soldiers.

DANZIGER: Yes -- war, the military, and the treatment of soldiers, which I think in this country is inexplicably shabby. And not just because of Vietnam. We don't treat the ones who served in Korea especially well, either. I also comment on international issues, which are often ignored in this country. My wife and I just spent two years in Germany -- my wife works for Deutsche Bank -- and in Germany, in Europe, everyone has a passport. In this country, something like 16% of Americans have a passport and yet they all think they know everything. I don't think I know anything, but I sure as hell know more than the average American. What they don't realize is that everything they think they know, that they've been fed from whatever sources they use, is usually just wrong or out of date.

Another topic I sometimes take up is the decline of manufacturing. I'm alarmed by our balance of trade with China, I think everyone ought to be scared out of their minds about that, because nothing is made in this country.

WORCESTER: Pretty serious subjects.

DANZIGER: I think cartoons can be used for serious subjects and generally speaking, most cartoonists, if they can think of something funny, even if it's extremely stupid, will go with something funny, because they want to be a counter to the seriousness of columns and editorials and letters.

WORCESTER: And you don't position yourself that way?

DANZIGER: I don't think that's the limit of cartooning, of drawing.

WORCESTER: What is an effective cartoon for you? Are you only satisfied if the reader goes out and actually researches the issue you've raised?

DANZIGER: I don't think you can expect them to go out and do research based on a cartoon, but to make them think or to use a visual metaphor that sticks with the audience. One of my favorite cartoons of all time was by Paul Conrad. It was on Nixon, and no one was better on Nixon than Paul Conrad. Nixon is up on the cross and he has one hand nailed already, and with his other hand, he's pounding the nail in. It just stuck with me. It was such a vicious drawing, and yet the symbolism of Nixon crucifying himself, in pretty broad terms, that is what he did. It always stuck with me as a tremendous idea.

WORCESTER: Your work is usually devoid of the familiar icons of political cartooning: the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of freedom, the elephant as the symbol of the Republicans. Are you trying to invent new metaphors?

DANZIGER: I don't want to leave people behind; that would be a huge business mistake. There are some people out there who like it complicated and who like to sit and look and read the second thing and the third thing and study the artwork. Take a look at this one here, this is quite a while ago. This is just a stupid cartoon.

WORCESTER: Two veiled women in Afghanistan and one of the men is saying, "Whoopee, would you look at the thumbs on her!" Men are pigs, even in Afghanistan.

DANZIGER: This is a rather dumb idea, and yet it says something about Islam and the Taliban and just the general creepiness of human beings.

WORCESTER: Are there ever times when you find yourself drawing something that's too horrific? That's too vicious? Where you step back and you say, "I can't do this, this is for a family newspaper?"

DANZIGER: Yeah, sure. There was a kid who got his arms blown off earlier in the war because he was holding onto his mother. She was killed and both of his arms had to be amputated. Now, that's pretty horrible. Not necessarily cartoon fare, but I was so overcome by the pictures of it, that I did a cartoon of Bush coming to the television, Uncle Sam is sitting there horrified by this and Bush is saying, "How's our policy of disarming Iraqis going?"

WORCESTER: So, you didn't do it?

DANZIGER: No, I did it, it's in the book. I don't know if anybody ran it, except for the Rutland Herald; they probably did.

WORCESTER: They're loyal!

DANZIGER: They're great!

WORCESTER: Do you get a lot of problems with newspaper editors not wanting to run your stuff to avoid controversy?

DANZIGER: Well, you sort of know if you're right. You never know if they said, "you shouldn't have done that," because they don't have to run anything. It just doesn't show up. It depends on the editor. My editor from the Rutland Herald won a Pulitzer a couple of years ago and so he's pretty solid and he knows his readers. He knows that his readers generally are more liberal, smarter, and more antiwar.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #272.]

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