According to a tweet by Gary Varvel earlier this afternoon, he will be honored with this year’s Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for editorial cartooning. Gary did a 11-part series highlighting some of the underprivileged living in the Indianapolis area. Here’s how I described it in an earlier post:
The series is called “The Path of Hope” and twice a month, Gary would head out off the office and interview individuals, their friends, pastors teachers and those who work to help a less fortunate person climb out of their difficult circumstances. Gary tells me that he even spent a week traveling on the local bus system to better understand how difficult it was for one family to simply get fresh groceries because the bus route takes so long from the store to their home (think of the difficulty of ice cream or other refrigerated foods).
The Path of Hope gives Gary a full color page to tell their story. For speed in producing the page, he blends his line art with photo art processed to look cartoonish. Along the way, Gary says he’s grown to appreciate the challenges some people are given in life and their tenacity to pull themselves, and pave the way for others, to get out of poverty.
Earlier this year he was awarded the 2010 Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning With a Conscience for the series.
I’ll post more details when the official announcement is made.
It was a good series. Congrats on the award. 😉
Congrats, Gary!