EDITORIAL CARTOONING

By: Joanna Wolper David Horsey
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

David Horsey was vacationing with his wife and two children when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer told him to return to the newsroom immediately.
Horsey flew back to Seattle to discover he had won the Pulitzer prize for his editorial cartoons of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. He was still enjoying the excitement, when he called from the Los Angeles airport on his way back to Mexico to finish his vacation.
"It was great fun to be the illustrator of this smarmy tale," Horsey says. "It was like a sleazy soap opera nicely contained in one year. It had a very linear movement, a nice beginning, middle, and end."
But Horsey. who calls himself a journalist who can draw, had to work hard to get beyond the easy humor.
"Jay Leno and David Letterman were taking care of that," he explains. "I wanted to do more than tell a joke. There were constitutional issues to be covered."
He submitted 18 cartoons. His favorite was the one with a religious Renaissance feel to it.
"It features a line of erupting bimbos, volcanos with the faces of Paula, Monica, and Gennifer," he chuckles. "I have Jerry Falwell in the corner digging up Vince Foster's grave."
Horsey is part of a North America Syndicate editorial cartoon package that goes to 450 papers. He is extremely gratified to win this year because there was so much good work being done. But ironically it turns out the 47-year-old cartoonist wasn't always a cartoonist. He was a state capital reporter and political columnist before he switched jobs.
"Cartooning is such a unique field," Horsey points out. "There are thousands of reporters but hardly any cartoonists. I could write more, and I've just finished my first novel. But it's not funny. I'm humorless when I write."
Horsey graduated in 1976 from the University of Washington, where he was editor of the student paper, The Daily, and earned a master's degree in International Relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury, U.K. He joined the staff of the Post-Intelligencer in 1979. He has won several awards for his cartoons and in 1998, the National Press foundation chose him as America's cartoonist of the year honoring him with the Berryman Award.
Finalists were Clay Bennett of The Christian Science Monitor and Rob Rogers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
These cartoons are an example of the work of David Horsey (right) of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. The top toon was published Feb. 8, 1998; the bottom one on Feb. 22, 1998.

?(Editor & Publisher Web Site:http:www.mediainfo.com) [Caption]
?(copyright: Editor & Publisher April 17, 1999) [Caption & Photo]