By: E&P Staff Jim Borgman posted a farewell blog entry today -- five days after The Cincinnati Enquirer announced that the editorial cartoonist had accepted a buyout from the Ohio newspaper.
"One week after graduating from Kenyon College 32 years ago I started drawing editorial cartoons for The Cincinnati Enquirer, awestruck to be working for the only newspaper that had ever been spread across my Price Hill family's kitchen table," he wrote, adding jokingly: "Some employee! Not a single promotion in three decades...."
Borgman, whose editorial cartoons are distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, continued: "But what a job. And what a remarkable landscape of nonsense and characters I've gotten to chronicle in the years since....
"It's been important to me that my work be of this place, Midwestern, blue collar, with a voice from the heartland. My characters are mostly doughy, big-hearted Cincinnatians, wrestling with the news and the way it trickles down into their hard-working lives....
"When I created 'Zits' 12 years ago with my partner Jerry Scott [for King Features Syndicate], my hours behind the drawing board doubled and the weekends turned into weekdays. A body can only do double duty for so long, and mine has gotten soft in the middle. It's telling me to get the bike down from the garage ceiling and breathe some fresh air again."
Borgman also discussed the weekly Enquirer comic strip he'll do starting this January. "All I can tell you so far is that it will be about a little flying pig who lives in the back booth of a chili parlor in a quirky town called Porkopolis," he said.
The complete farewell blog post can be seen
here. It was mentioned today on
Rob Tornoe's Politicker.com blog, where Tornoe also paid tribute to Borgman.
E&P's Sept. 3 story on Borgman's buyout can be seen
here.
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