It's sometimes hard to wrap your head around a big story, and for most of us drawing editorial cartoons 9/11/ 01, that was the biggest story of our professional lives.
Birthplace of Obama: Oahu. Birthplace of Obama's budget policies: Neverland.
It's a fun job, but it's stressful because you have to be funny. You have to have punch lines and captions. Be funny now! And if you're not inspired, they don't care - be funny now! They have to fill that hole the next day.
A gorilla with a cellphone riding a bicycle is bound to generate some clever captions.
My favorite caricaturist is Al Hirschfeld. I'm always trying to give my caricatures that streamlined quality - and I often fall short.
When I look at someone's face, there's something in my brain that just clicks - that breaks down their face into the elements that go into a caricature. It might be like the way a chef tastes a dish and can break down into elements what went into it.
Comic-Con is incredibly important to San Diego, but that doesn't mean we can't poke a little fun at it!
I loved practical jokes. I loved being goofy on the playground, and I loved doing silly cartoons, but I was not this subversive little delinquent. I am an Eagle Scout, after all.
For an encore, I might do health-care cartoons using my own blood. That will be my last act.
My dad was an FBI agent. My mom and dad were straight arrow types, and I had a conservative, suburban Orange County upbringing.
I have four boys and two girls, and the girls, they typically want you to draw princesses, Tinkerbell, Cinderella, things like that.
I'm fully aware that not every cartoon is Pulitzer material. That said, I'm proud of my Pulitzer portfolio, the 20 that got judged.
I use a quill pen dipped in India ink. I also like Faber-Castell brush pens and Pigma Micron pens. And I work on Duo-Shade board.
I read the 'New York Times,' 'USA Today,' the 'Union-Tribune,' then go online to Drudge, CNN, Fox News, blogs.
We can self-censor ourselves for various reasons, but we can't live in a world where some person or some group decides what's offensive and what's not.
My parents always got a kick out of my art. I was always able to make them laugh. As I got older, I remember the thrill I got when I graduated from making my classmates laugh to making adults laugh. Kind of a watershed moment.
