Editorial cartoons for the Mustang Daily

Over the course of four years I drew editorial cartoons for the Mustang Daily, the student-run daily newspaper for Cal Poly State University (San Luis Obispo). Since this was back when the paper was print only I haven’t had access to them…until now! Cal Poly recently digitized the entire 100-year run of the paper. I tracked down all of my illustrations – nine quarters’ worth, from ’96-’99, 231 cartoons in total.

The deadlines for a newspaper, especially a daily newspaper, are pretty grueling. I’d usually follow the same routine:

1. Stop by the the newsroom to see what topics would be in the next day’s Opinion or Letters to the Editor
2. Go down the hall to the radio station, KCPR, and sit on their broken-down couch to do research and figure out what to draw. During my last year, the paper opted to run solo editorial cartoons (not connected to the letters) so those took extra research. I’d usually read through the AP wire for potential topics.
3. Draw! The cartoon itself could take an hour or more to draw. On some days when they needed more space to fill there were multiple illustrations to draw.
4. When it was done, go back down the hall and drop ’em off with the editor.

The cartoons ranged from very local concerns (campus politics, things happening around San Luis Obispo), to typical college woes, to US and world politics. I’ll be writing posts about a half dozen or so themes I’ve gleaned from looking at all of them together and some of the context around them. In the meantime, here are a dozen of my favorite illustrations that showcase some of the variety of topics.