Walt Handelsman Quotes

So cartooning, for me, is an honorable thing. It's pushing the envelope. It's the truth of something through exaggeration.

I did 32 years of political cartoons, one every day for six days a week, I wrote and drew every word, every line. That body of work is the one I'm proudest of.

I've been interested in cartooning all my life. I read the comics as a kid, and I did cartoons for high school publications - the newspaper and yearbook and soon. In college, I got interested in political cartooning and did political cartoons.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

As an editorial cartoonist now, I live for those moments of inspiration, and it is exhilarating to be inspired by a topic, have an opinion on the topic, come up with a good cartoon on the topic, and to draw it and get it in the paper the next day. That is what I live for.

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

It is more raw and unfettered and I'm more likely going into something you could call extreme cartooning. There's a lot of that in the course of 'Holy Terror.' There are interludes where there are pictures - cartoon pictures - of modern figures and they are all wordless. It's up to readers to put the words in.

My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them.

Drawings don't have a point. Cartoons, you want to have an opinion; you want them to express a viewpoint.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

As a cartoonist, I'm a caricaturist. First you find out what somebody really looks like, and then you find out what they 'really' look like.

You can go through comic strips alone and study the common man. You can trace our history.

Animation wasn't my love, but drawing was. I loved drawing, and when it came time to graduate from high school, I looked around and it was like, "Wow, I don't really want to study math. I don't really want to study science. I don't really want to study literature. Is there a place where I can go and draw cartoons?"

I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

What can make your work interesting is as much who you are, as how you draw.

Dawn Of The Dead is about how we're just a country cannibalizing itself, turning into one shopping mall, and everyone at the mall is just brain-dead, wandering around. Capitalism gone awry, and the worst parts of human nature coming out. All these different things that people read into the films that are all there, very strong anti-Bush sentiments that went into making those films. It's great. I like it when people get it the second or third time, when someone else points it out to them. They don't realize it's been there all along. Those are my favorite movies.

I'm a cartoonist, it's what I am at heart, so cartoons take reality and deform it and make it grotesque, you make it funny, but you alter it. If it works, it's based on reality. That's what I try to do.

I've been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It's just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody.

Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.

I have always had a deep belief that every movie, every artistic expression, is political. Don't be fooled. Even ones that we wouldn't consider overtly political are political. When we spend time doing anything, whether it's distraction or whether it's something that we have to face, it is always political. That's my belief.

I do not sing politics. I merely sing the truth.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

It's a new art form, showing people how little we care.

I remember my friends at primary and secondary school admiring my work and even paying me money for some of my pieces.

I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing.