Quarter-century of quips
New book sums up cartoonist Tim Newcomb's skewerings
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Political cartoonist Tim Newcomb of Worcester sits in his Montpelier office on Friday. Newcomb has just released a retrospective of his cartoons from the last 25 years. Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus |
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By Daniel Barlow Vermont Press Bureau - Published: November 29, 2008
MONTPELIER – Tim Newcomb has satirized four sitting Vermont governors over hundreds of political cartoons during his 25-year career – and he usually always feels bad about it afterward.
One cartoon this year showed Republican Gov. James Douglas in a rubber boat literally riding a wave of national party contributions soon after vetoing a bill that would place new limits on campaign fundraising.
Newcomb's Douglas takes key traits from the real-life politician and transforms them into exaggerated quirks as the cartoon version sports just a wisp of hair, a thin frame and oversized glasses across a childlike face.
"Jim Douglas is such a gracious gentleman," Newcomb said Friday from his downtown Montpelier studio. "He is such a naturally likeable guy that I find myself apologetic to him whenever I see him."
Since 1983, Newcomb, has targeted Vermont politicians and issues in his editorial cartoons, from the rise of now-U.S. Sen. Bernard Sanders' surprise political career to Statehouse battles over civil unions to this year's lackluster gubernatorial campaign.
This month he published a 240-page collection of the best cartoons from his 25 year career. "A Gaggle of Governors" features avian versions of Douglas and Govs. Howard Dean, Madeleine Kunin and Richard Snelling on the cover – and a host of more caricatures of familiar faces, such as U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch inside.
"Dean never seemed to like my cartoons," Newcomb said. "He always had such a short fuse and seemed to be perpetually in a bad mood."
Newcomb said he "grew up all over the country" as his father's job with chemical giant W.R. Grace had them moving from the northeast to the Midwest and to the south. As a child, Newcomb first began drawing by copying his favorite superheroes – DC's the Flash and Marvel's Spider-Man – from comic books.
He said his first published work was a collection of cartoons about his high school, which the school allowed him full use of their photocopiers to produce. The collection was a fundraiser for his class and the book quickly sold out.
His love for cartooning grew during stints at Kenyon College in Ohio (one of the other students there at the time was Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson) and the School for Visual Arts in New York City.
"There were lots of other students with great interests in cartooning," he said. "And it stuck with me, too."
Newcomb's earliest jobs included drawing advertisement proposals for Ford Motor Co. and as an art director for Forbes magazine, a job that included two years of traveling the world to take stock photographs for the magazine (it was during one of these trips to New Zealand that he met his wife).
He decided to settle down in Vermont in the early 1980s because his family had long-running roots in the state and he still had many friends living here. He and his wife were also planning a family and neither one wanted to raise children in Manhattan.
Almost immediately, Newcomb found homes for his cartoons in Vermont. His first one about state politics was published in the now-defunct Vermont Vanguard and he quickly went on to draw cartoons for the Times Argus, Rutland Herald, Valley News, Seven Days and a host of weeklies, many of which are no longer around.
"I've found that newspapers are always interested in editorial cartoons," he said. "The problem is that so many are also strapped for cash."
The easiest Vermont governors to satirize as cartoons have been Douglas, Kunin and Snelling, Newcomb said. But he admits he has always had a hard time caricaturizing Dean, who lacks any overt physical characteristics to exaggerate. One of his personal favorites has also been Neale Lunderville, now Douglas' secretary of administration, who is shown in the cartoons as a lost little boy in a suit and tie.
In the introduction to "Gaggle," Vermont journalist Chris Graff recounts Leahy's comments on his cartoon version in Newcomb's comics, saying, "Tim draws an egg, adds a single hair atop, fastens glasses to a shell – and darn if it doesn't look like me."
Douglas said Friday that "sometimes it stings a little" when he sees how Newcomb depicts him in the cartoons, but other times "it is quite entertaining and humorous." He said Newcomb was a "heck of a nice guy."
"Political cartoons have played an important role, going back to the 19th Century, in contributing to political discourse," Douglas said. "They often put an exclamation point on the big issues and personalities. Tim has certainly continued that tradition."
Newcomb, the Times Argus and the Rutland Herald landed in hot water 23 years ago after the papers published one of his cartoons depicting Killington ski area employees, armed with plungers, ready to unclog the mountain's snow-making machines.
The owners of the Killington ski area sued Newcomb and the two newspapers. The ski area was the center of controversy at the time as it tried to convince lawmakers to allow them to circumvent Act 250 laws by releasing treated sewage waste through its snow-making machines.
The move would have allowed for the company to build more condos in the area.
"I was shocked that they got upset over a dumb little cartoon," Newcomb said. "I just thought it was a funny gag."
Killington's owners weren't laughing, however. Although they dropped their suit against Newcomb after the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union took up his case, the ski company fought the Argus and the Herald all the way to the state Supreme Court. The court ruled in favor of the newspapers.
Newcomb got national attention over the cartoon, lifting the number of people who read it from thousands to millions. He proudly states that it was the only cartoon to ever appear in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (it accompanied an article about the lawsuit).
"It was my 15 minutes of fame," he said with a laugh.
Reading through 25 years of Newcomb's cartoons is the same as recapping the great political events and controversies of Vermont during those same years. The book leads with a 1983 cartoon on the affects of acid rain on maple syrup production and ends with a sad-looking Dean alone on the Democratic National Convention stage with the night janitor.
The cartoons also remind us of certain sides of politicians we may have forgotten about. In a series of cartoons during Dean's years as governor he is often depicted as fighting his own political party – a stark difference to just a few years later when he became the anti-war presidential darling and then the chairman of the national party.
Since the beginning of his career here, Newcomb has often drawn cartoons about the environment, from trees soaking up mercury to mid-winter skiers finding no snow on the top of Vermont's mountains due to global warming.
But he has reserved some of his toughest cartoons for Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. The plant is often depicted as walking and talking nuclear reactor that looks like it was on the losing end of a few rounds of boxing with Mike Tyson.
"It's become its own character," Newcomb said. "The problems there have continued to mount up over the years. My cartoons about Vermont Yankee from 20 years ago are just as relevant today."
Contact Daniel Barlow at Daniel.Barlow@timesargus.com.
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