Behind the minds of editorial cartoonists

By Giorgio Lee

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After making a cup of coffee in his office, Michael De Adder places a stack of newspapers on his desk and skims through each one, trying to find a story that will make him upset.

“The inspiration behind my cartoons is when I get mad at an issue and I find with politics these days it’s really easy to get upset,” De Adder explained. “The best cartoons are the ones that are fed by emotion, whether it’s anger or sadness.”

Since the inception of the pictorial satire, a precursor to political cartoons, in the early 1700’s with William Hogarth’s early print Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme, editorial cartoonists have used their emotions wither its anger, sadness, or disbelief, to not only choose the topics they want to illustrate, but to attract an audience with a provocative drawing.

De Adder says this is the average mindset an editorial cartoonist has when selecting their next creation -picking a topic that draws out a negative emotion.

With more then 30 years of experience being a freelance cartoonist for well known newspapers such as the Chronicle Herald and the Toronto Star, De Adder says that drawing out of anger can sometimes lead to severe consequences.

“You need to draw a cartoon that shocks and awe people,” De Adder said. “But there are times where I’ve missed the mark or made an error.”

“There’s a wide variety of reasons why I regret some of those cartoons, some of them have garnered a lot of complaints that I don’t regret what so ever, and then there’s a few where a couple of people have said something where I do regret drawing them.”

“It either threaded on a sensitive issue that I didn’t see as hurting feelings. One of the drawings I regret is a cartoon I drew for the Toronto Star where a little girl got shot and I screwed up the words of the cartoons. That is one out the thousands of cartoons I’ve drawn done that I regret.”

Not afraid of making people upset by the content manner in his cartoons, Patrick Corrigan, a Toronto based editorial cartoonist, has covered well-known celebrities from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to former Raptors captain Chris Bosh.

As a cartoonist that’s been around since the early 1990’s, Corrigan explains that the inspirations behind his political cartoons are not only fed by anger, but by disbelief-especially in today’s society.

“Absorbing the news, radio, newspapers, the Internet, you have to try to hit a hot topic and make it timely,” Corrigan says. “There are ranges of emotions that help create a cartoon, more often then not mild anger, and some disbelief.”

Recently working on a cartoon of U.S president Donald Trump’s “claims of winning and success in the face of so many controversies” for the Toronto Star, Corrigan explains why drawing a cartoon out of emotion can lead to the delusions of change for artists.

“One of the delusions cartoonists suffer is the thought that we can change the world. Over my career this hasn’t happened yet, but we can affect some changes here and there if we can embarrass our target effectively.”

Greg Perry, an editorial cartoonist living in British Columbia, has spent 25 years drawing some of the worlds most notorious world leaders and events for newspapers such as the Oliver Chronicle and the Penticton Herald. From his drawings of U.S president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un shaking nuclear rockets on high chairs, as though they were fussy babies shaking their bottles to a cuckoo clock with Trump springing out, Perry tries to attract readers with his simple, yet edgy way of creating cartoons.

 Always trying to out-due his last creation, Perry says editorial cartoons and political satire are generally harder to pull of in today’s society.

Good satire is becoming more difficult to pull off in the era of social media ‘instant-outrage’ and hyper sensitivities,” Perry explained. “Good satire skewers hypocrisy and the pompous and ridiculous in politics, culture and society and when it’s done well, it exposes these shortcomings with humor, while also laying bare these faults and flaws for ridicule.”

When creating his cartoons Perry’s goal has always remained the same- pick a political leader or social event and highlight the faults. Even though Perry thinks his cartoons wont change the world, he does think there is a chance to implement change on a smaller scale, as long as the public wants it.

“The goal is to change things for the better.”

“We all hope to affect change, but a cartoon is just another straw on the camel’s back,” he says. “It can only affect change if there’s public appetite and political will.”