Thursday, November 29, 2007
News / News Bites That Tribune cartoon job
Posted by Michael Miner on Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 9:51 AM
Scott Stantis's father spent his career in local television, and Stantis grew up admiring those seigneurial TV personalities who are giants in the cities that they serve even if nobody's heard of them one state over. Stantis drew on this affection when he composed the editorial cartoon honoring the late John Drury that ran in Wednesday's Chicago Tribune.
What Stantis didn't draw on was any particular sense of Drury himself. Stantis didn't grow up here, and for the past 11 years he's been the cartoonist for the News in Birmingham, Alabama. (He also draws one cartoon a week for USA Today, and a daily comic strip, Prickly City, that the Tribune used to carry.) Stantis keeps tabs with Chicago because the city fascinates him and also because he sends the Tribune the occasional Chicago-based cartoon. He's been doing that for years and more frequently in the past couple of months, since Bruce Dold, editor of the editorial page, called and encouraged him to.
Aside from the semiretired Dick Locher, the Tribune hasn't had a staff editorial cartoonist since Jeff MacNelly died seven years ago. Various cartoonists have thought they were within an inch of getting the job, and all were wrong. Oddly, Stantis isn't one of them -- even though he'd like the job and would happily come to Chicago for it, he's done a lot of cartoons for the Tribune already, and he believes that he and the Tribune are on the same wavelength politically. I told him it sounded as if he and the Tribune are in one of those office sitcom relationships where everyone but themselves can see it's a match. Except in this case, he said, one of us can see that too.
Ideally, he said, when something big happens in Chicago the story won't be complete until the city finds out in the morning what Stantis had to say about it. MacNelly didn't play that role -- he lived in Virginia and stuck to national issues. And in fact nobody's played that role in Chicago media since Mike Royko, and it could be that nobody will ever play it again. That show might be over.
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Miner is living in the past. Welcome to 21st century, old man. Royko long gone, forgotten.
Miner's right, Zorn. The Reader isn't the same, either.
Royko is, of course, gone...But you can certainly be younger than I am (45) and still remember him and his day-to-day work and influence. "Forgotten"? There's a statement clearly written by someone a) who never knew; b) who is too young to care; or c) who wasn't around and/or didn't get it.
I think the POINT was that Royko IS gone and nobody has stepped up to fill that role.
I absolutely agree with that (and Kass just ends up looking foolish as he tries); it was "Zorn"'s dismissive "forgotten" I was refuting...
Zorn is being sarcastic here. If you read his blog you'd get it. Locher draws more cartoons than the Trib prints. You can see them on the cartoonists association website.
"If you read his blog you'd get it" -- no thanks; life is short enough as it is (although that experience may well make it SEEM so much longer). Thanks for the Locher tip, though...
I would just like so say that I am John Drury's granddaughter and that cartoon represented him perfectly. At first, I couldn't even read it because it represented him so great. He was such a great grandpa and man, which is perfectly depicted through out that cartoon. Who ever wrote that the cartton did not depict him obviously did not know him.
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