Cartoon Collector
“And there’s plenty more that I was unable to contact or didn’t respond to me who do equally fine stuff,” Berger said. “It’s amazing what’s going on out there. . . . There are so many people doing such tremendous stuff, and the fact it winds up as liner in a bird cage is disturbing.”
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We asked Berger to account for such a bounty. He cited Mad’s infectious influence on his generation, and added the example of the “seminal” and “consistently satirical” Pat Oliphant (Pulitzer in 1967), who demonstrated, Berger told us, that editorial cartooning can be hilarious.
We called Tom Toles. A Toles cartoon–he often appears in the Sun-Times–is immediately identifiable by its scrunched-up panels and dialogue balloons. And by its brainy, derisive wit. Toles’s Ronald Reagan is a lethal airhead.
Toles told us he already sees too many editorial cartoons; he doesn’t need Bull’s Eye to keep up with his peers and he’s not sure he’ll buy it. Mitch Berger described the type of person he hopes will. “I’m looking for the person who grew up reading Mad and maybe the National Lampoon and maybe outgrew Mad and likes satire and visual cartoons and wants to see more of it,” Berger said.
One of them is Bruce Buursma, the religion writer who was just moved at his own request to sports (where next week Dick Leslie, now associate managing editor for news, takes over as editor). Buursma tells us he’ll still be covering rituals, sacraments, and devotions. “The cheerleaders perform a kind of vestal virgin role,” he points out. Another new face in sports will be making an even more remarkable leap. After the ’88 elections are over, Washington correspondent Jon Margolis is coming back to Chicago to write a sports column.
“It’ll be a different kind of egomania, I suspect,” Margolis reflected.
