Ted Rall never knew Don Wright. But like so many political cartoonists, he was touched by his work.
“He was a defining liberal artist for the last few decades of the 20th century,” Rall, a veteran political cartoonist whose work has appeared at such outlets as Forbes, PennLive in Harrisburg, Pa., and the Daily Beast, told The Comics Journal.
“Don's cartoons were consistently passionate without succumbing to blind rage … an example for the rest of us,” Rall said.
Wright, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who spent years skewering the powerful in the pages of the Palm Beach Post, died March 24 at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 90 years old.
The cause of death was complications from surgeries, his wife, Carolyn Jay Wright, said, according to the Washington Post.
In a career that spanned nearly a half-century, Wright drew roughly 11,000 cartoons for the Palm Beach Post and the former Miami News, which shuttered in 1988, The New York Times said. He retired from the Palm Beach Post in 2008.
Wright’s reach, however, stretched beyond the Sunshine State, appearing nationwide in syndication. He took on such topics as racism, the Vietnam War, and clergy sexual abuse.
In all cases, Wright had a “classy, careful line that conveyed a cool, thoughtful approach to graphic commentary,” that won him the admiration of his colleagues in the tightly knit trade of editorial cartooning, Rall told The Comics Journal.
“I never heard any of his colleagues express anything less than admiration for his work,” Rall said.
According to the Post, Wright had no formal training in cartooning. But he said he saw his cartoons as an antidote to the other work he was reading on newspaper editorial pages.
“The editorial cartoon has become a welcome relief from some of the ponderous, elitist, overwritten poopery that typifies so many editorial pages today,” Wright told Time in a 1975 essay about editorial cartoons.
Longtime Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis was just embarking on his career when he decided to reach out to Wright as he pulled one of his famously late-night shifts at the Miami News, an afternoon newspaper.
“I called him out of the blue, and he was incredibly gracious,” Stantis said. “He was tough. But I was such a fanboy. I also was trying to become a cartoonist.”
Wright wrote the young Stantis a blurb that he could use with his portfolio as he hunted for work. It was one of two moments, he recalled, that he would never forget.
“I was 20 or 21,” Stantis said. “He was pretty remarkable.”
The second came years later, when Stantis, whose cartoons convey a conservative political perspective, had his mind changed on the death penalty by a Wright’s commentary on capital punishment.
“He did two cartoons on the death penalty, and they were so powerful and persuasive that I rethought my position on that issue, and changed it,” he said.
“I had to explain it within the context of my own beliefs. I don’t trust the government to deliver my mail,” he explained. “Why hand them the right to life and death? To me, that is the ultimate compliment, if a cartoon can change someone’s mind.”
Speaking to the Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoonist Mike Luckovich, also a two-time Pulitzer winner, said that “besides being a great, beautiful artist, and hard-hitting cartoonist,” Wright also was “clever.”
“When you have the ability to be hard-hitting and make a point, but do it in a clever way, that I really think is the epitome of editorial cartooning – and he was at the top of what we do.”
Wright collected his first Pulitzer Prize in 1966, when he was 32, for a one-panel cartoon that took on the no-win nature of the nuclear arms race.
Facing each other in a landscape scarred by massive craters, two lone survivors face each other, with one asking, “You mean you were bluffing?”
He won his second Pulitzer, according to the Post, in 1980 for a cartoon skewering capital punishment.
That cartoon shows two Florida State prison guards carting a corpse from the electric chair. One guard asks “Why did the governor say we’re doing this?” His colleague fires back, “To make it clear that we value human life.”
The drawing in that prize-winning 1966 cartoon was emblematic of Wright’s artistic style, with painterly lines that echoed earlier lithographs, Stantis said
“It was dramatic without being overdrawn,” Stantis said. “It was a sublime approach.”
Stantis described Wright as a “bridge” between an older generation of cartoonists, such as the famed World War II-era combat cartoonist Bill Mauldin and Herblock and a new one, exemplified by Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly.
“You could tell [Wright’s] influences were 19th century lithographs,” Stantis said. “You could see it in the flow of the line. There was an effortlessness, but there also was … discipline,” to the work.
Wright also claimed membership to a generation of cartoonists whose work was capable of not only moving readers, but transforming public opinion – a notion that seems improbable, if not entirely impossible, in the digital age.
“The era he drew in, editorial cartoons were really important,” Stantis said. “They could make a difference on the national scale, but they definitely made a difference on the local level.”
In a comment appended to an obituary on The Daily Cartoonist website, Mark Mathes, who was Wright’s editor at Tribune Media Services from 1994 until 1999, said the veteran cartoonist “skewered presidents and governors, yet his caricatures of the Little Man showed citizens dealing with national issues. Don’s editorial cartoons stopped the reader flipping through pages, and started dialogue on critical public issues throughout his career.”
Mathes observed that Wright had “a fluid line and a photographer’s attention to detail because he worked in graphics arts and photography before the Miami News agreed to run his editorial cartoons.”
Matthes also noted Wright’s commitment to craft, observing that “when we had dinner, it was only after he’d completed the next day’s cartoon at 9:30 p.m. … His wife, a journalist, understood the deadlines.”
And while Wright’s work could elicit a smile, “Don’s work was not always liberal and the cartoons were not always funny,” Mathes said.
Speaking to the Times before his death, Wright offered a similar sentiment.
“I’m sometimes baffled by the number of readers who believe that cartoons should be lightweight and entertainingly ‘funny,’” Wright said to the newspaper. “Humor has a lot of relatives — wry, subtle, slapstick and even black — all aimed at the endless Iraq War, inept and corrupt politicians, rising unemployment, recession, Americans losing their homes, and on and on.”
“But think about it for a moment,” he told the Times. “How funny are those?”
