Sports Cartoonist Drew Litton Marks 25 Years With 'RMN'

By: Dave Astor The past few months have been memorable for Drew Litton, who holds the very rare newspaper position of staff sports cartoonist.

On the positive side, he reached his 25th anniversary with the Denver Rocky Mountain News and saw the usually underachieving Colorado Rockies make an incredible run to reach their first World Series since the team's inaugural 1993 season. On the negative side, his wife Marcia had serious health problems from which she's now recuperating.

"It's been crazy," said Litton, during an interview today with E&P. "Actually, it's been crazy for the last seven years."

That's because Litton survived cancer in 2000, his first wife Debbie died of cancer in 2004, his father died in 2005, and Marcia -- who he married in 2006 -- was hospitalized in Phoenix for treatment of several aneurysms.

How did Litton work effectively amidst all this? "I try to compartmentalize," he replied. "You've go to do what you've got to do. I've drawn in hospital rooms. With today's technology, I'm able to do my job almost anywhere."

But Marcia's situation was so serious that Litton didn't draw many cartoons during his time with her in Arizona this summer and fall.

"The Rockies went on a tear when we were in Phoenix," said Litton, 48. "But I hit the ground running when I got back to Denver" -- including doing two large color illustrations for the Rocky Mountain News' front page.

Litton said wryly that he was sort of relieved when the Rockies' historic streak of 21 wins in 22 games came to an abrupt end with four straight World Series losses to the Boston Red Sox. "I had been ripping the Rockies for months," he recalled, especially the team's owners for not spending enough money by Major League Baseball standards. "I didn't want to eat too much more crow!"

Of course, Litton also cartoons about the Denver Broncos (football), the Denver Nuggets (basketball), the Colorado Avalanche (hockey), and more. "Local really makes the difference," he said, noting that those kinds of cartoons get strong readership.

That's especially the case when cartoons are very timely. Litton has often drawn cartoons right after a night game that get posted online before midnight and published in the print edition the next morning. "One time during the [2007 baseball] playoffs I had a half hour to do a cartoon before deadline," he recalled. "You learn to draw quickly."

The Rocky Mountain News staffer also does a couple of national cartoons a week that are syndicated by United Media's Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) division. For instance, today's cartoon shows how baseball fans have to pay higher ticket prices to help fund huge player salaries.

Litton obviously gets responses (positive and negative) from many sports fans -- and from some of the people he draws. Several years ago, Rockies pitcher Denny Nagle screamed at Litton in the locker room for a cartoon about the weight gain of the team's catcher at the time (home plate was drawn as a food plate). And John Elway, the Broncos' retired Hall-of-Fame quarterback, never liked how prominent his teeth looked in Litton's cartoons -- a number of which were collected in the 2004 "Give My Regards to Elway" book.

"I'm not on some Christmas-card lists," Litton quipped.

Elway did get a measure of revenge when he was one of the people asked to draw a cartoon to mark Litton's 25th anniversary with the Rocky Mountain News this September. The paper published a special section that appeared in print and online.

Litton got his current job in 1982 after spotting an E&P classified ad while working in the El Paso (Texas) Times art department. At first, the University of Texas at El Paso alumnus struggled. He was just 23, and felt he wasn't doing good work. "Thankfully, they were patient with me," Litton said of his editors.

There was also less fodder for local cartoons back then, given that the Rockies and Avalanche were not yet around and the NFL was on strike. But there was the signing of Elway in 1983, and the Nuggets had a team that included Alex English, Dan Issel, and Kiki Vandeweghe.

Litton -- who has cartooned from Rockies spring training camps and from several Super Bowls -- occasionally meets the people he draws. And he particularly likes some of them, including Rockies player Todd Helton, Rockies manager Clint Hurdle, and former Rockies manager Don Baylor.

But Litton tries to keep some distance. "If you had a friendship with any of these guys and did a cartoon that's controversial, it puts you in a weird spot," he said.

Litton added that he has never asked an athlete for an autograph. "It's a big no-no," he said. Litton was most sorely tempted to get a signature when watching prolific scorer Pete Maravich play in the old-timers' match at the 1984 NBA All-Star Game in Denver.

Then there's the matter of so few sports cartoonists. "If you had a convention of sports cartoonists, you could hold it in a couple of broom closets," said Litton.

Why aren't there more? Litton said the desire of newspapers to cut costs is of course a huge reason. But he added that papers -- especially those in major sports cities -- are making a mistake.

"Many people spend more time in life arguing about sports than about politics," Litton noted, in discussing the popularity of sports. And he said local cartoons are one of the few things a newspaper can offer that readers can't find anywhere else.

The Rocky Mountain News realizes this, as it employs Litton as well as Ed Stein -- who does editorial cartoons for the paper and NEA, as well as the local "Denver Square" comic strip.

Given the rarity of a staff sports cartoonist position, said Litton, "I'm very grateful to be able to do what I do."