Editorial cartooning

Matt Wuerker shaking things up in D.C.

Skip to comments

Alan Gardner February 13, 2007 1 minute 2 comments

Matt Wuerker is getting props over at the Washingtonian as the new Politico editorial cartoonist.

Against that backdrop, Matt Wuerker’s illustrations pop off the pages. What distinguishes the Politico from its competitors-Roll Call and The Hill-is that it has chosen to hire and highlight a political cartoonist at a time when newspaper cartooning is a dying craft.

“It’s an anomaly,” Wuerker told me from his DC home. “I was shocked and surprised when I heard they were looking for a staff cartoonist. I was shocked again when they chose me.”

…

Wuerker says the Politico’s editors have promised to experiment with new cartoon forms on the newspaper’s Web site.

“Political cartoons are really well suited to the Web,” he says. “What we do best is simplify things to pithy caricatures that make people laugh and maybe even think, and this can be done with pixels just as well as with ink and paper, maybe even better.

“In the olden days a good cartoon got hung up on the fridge with a magnet to be shared with friends,” he adds. “The Internet is just a bigger, better refrigerator door.”