In its first issue, on December 13, 1954, the Texas Observer ran a political cartoon by Don Bartlett taking a swipe at the Republican-leaning tendencies of Democratic Governor Allan Shivers. Beside it ran Observer founding editor Ronnie Dugger’s ambitious, if eccentric, manifesto. “We will twit the self-important and honor the truly important,” he wrote. “We will lay the bark to the dignity of any public man any time we see fit.”
It was the beginning of a long Observer tradition—skewering those who needed it, using both printed words and the sharp sword of cartooning. “The cartoons arrived this morning … precise and timely,” Dugger wrote to Bartlett. “I believe I shall put [one of them] on Page One for maximum effect.”
Elsewhere, the tradition of editorial cartooning is waning fast. The membership of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists has dropped from a high of more than 200 in the 1980s to less than 20 in recent years. Last July, three Pulitzer Prize-winners were fired in one day, when McClatchy, owner of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, dropped staff cartoonists from its papers.
