Remember Steve Sack?
Of course you do. He was the biggest name in editorial cartooning in this part of the world for 42 years — and still is, actually, because to this day no one has successfully replaced him.
Sack retired from what is now the Minnesota Star Tribune in 2022 — not because he wanted to, but because he had lost the use of his right arm.
Here’s how he told the story to a class of high school journalists in St. Paul this month:
“I had cancer a number of years ago, and I was treated with chemo and radiation, and they cured me. I was off work for maybe five months, but I came back and I was doing cartoons again. … Things were going fine.
“But as they say, radiation is the gift that keeps on giving. After three years I started getting a numbness in my fingertips, and the numbness spread up my arm, all the way up to my neck. At first they thought it might be a carpal-tunnel-type thing, and I had surgery for carpal tunnel.
“And that was the last day I could hold a pen or pencil in this hand, in my drawing hand. So I had to retire, like that. I couldn’t do my job.”
If you’re unfamiliar with his work, Sack is not the kind of cartoonist you find drawing caricatures at an amusement park. He does funny drawings, sure, but they are different from other people’s funny drawings, and they are sophisticated commentary besides. In 2013 he won the Pulitzer Prize.
The disappearance of his cartoons from the Star Tribune was a blow to readers who looked forward to his near-daily appearances in the paper. It was also a loss to the population of employed editorial cartoonists in the United States, a dwindling band of practitioners that Sack estimates now numbers around a dozen.
For years, Sack had drawn his cartoons on an iPad instead of on paper. He had also developed a hobby, using a sculpting program and 3D printer, to create three-dimensional figures of animals, celebrities and politicians. After he lost the ability to draw, he found he could still create his sculptures. They resemble his drawings; the sculpted Donald Trump who sits pouting behind bars, his overlong red tie trailing across the floor of his cell, is unmistakably the same Donald Trump we see in Sack’s cartoons.
“It’s a cartoon in 3D, so of course it’s going to have my imprint on it,” he said.
Sack took a collection of sculptures with him on one of his pilgrimages to Saint-Just-le-Martel, a village in central France that hosts an annual festival to celebrate editorial cartoonists. Called the International Exhibition of Caricature, Press Drawing and Humor, the event draws designers and artists from around the world, according to the town’s website. “Other places appreciate cartoons a lot more than America,” Sack explained. He exhibited his sculptures there, and festivalgoers bought out his supply.
As popular as the sculptures proved to be, he wondered whether he might be able to teach himself to draw again. The effects of his cancer treatment continued to render his right arm useless, but he wanted to see what he could do with his left. He enrolled in a life-drawing class.
“Every week I’d go and draw naked people,” he said. “It was relaxing and pleasant, and I was among other artists. The drawings weren’t all that great at first. But I kept going, and I started getting more and more coordination.”
Then came the moment that set him back on the road to cartooning. “The Metro Surge thing happened,” he said. “And I got angry. So I thought, give it a try.”
Though he could draw with his left hand, he couldn’t do the fine detail work he once did with his right. But he found that by using his iPad to zoom way in on an image, “to almost a molecular level,” he could get nearly the same result.
He draws a line, figuratively speaking, at letting AI do the work.
“Almost all the cartoonists I know are up in arms about it,” he said of artificial intelligence. “There are programs where you can generate caricatures or cartoons with AI within seconds. … The scary thing is how good some of those drawings are. A lot of the cartoonists are furious about it. They’re trying to stop it. They’re trying to keep the AI companies from using our cartoons to feed their machines — to teach them how to do our work.”
Until the machines evolve, at least, Sack’s work is what you might call inimitable: Trump using his FIFA Peace Prize as a bludgeon to beat the dove of peace into a bloody mess; a granite Minuteman memorial giving a fist bump to a pair of Minnesotans carrying whistles and cellphones; a densely packed crowd of protesters forming a giant hand to flick away an ICE agent.
As distinctive as his work is, Sack is modest about his process. “What I do is a very simple thing,” he said. “I describe it as reading the paper, cracking a joke, drawing a picture and turning it in. That’s my job description.”
He’s back to producing cartoons at a steady clip, two per week instead of his once-customary five. He publishes them on Substack, where readers can see them for free. Or they can subscribe for $8 a month and get a distinctive thank-you gift: a whoopee cushion decorated with a Sack drawing of Trump’s face.
This story first appeared at MinnPost: https://tinyurl.com/mr46e3my.