Glenn Fleishman writes about the uptick in recognition for Matt Bors who was honored this year as a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Herblock Award winner and the SPJ Sigma Delta Chi Award.
He’s scruffy, doesn’t own a suit, and lives in Portland. He expresses withering contempt at politicians, mainstream media, and what he views as hypocrisy. He’s never made more than $15,000 a year from his cartoons, and supplements that income with illustration, freelance editorial jobs, and, possibly, blood plasma?at least he did in college; he has the scar to prove it.
The 28-year-old Bors was thus a bit surprised this year, and occasionally nonplussed, when he won the Herblock Prize for “excellence in editorial cartooning,” was a finalist (with Oregonian newspaper staffer Jack Ohman) for the Pulitzer Prize, and received a Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award.
[expletive], Matt, when did you [expletive] sell out?
He didn’t. The establishment came to him after a stellar run of cartoons in 2011, in which he sent up the pope, climate deniers, Ariana Huffington, the death of newspapers, Mitt Romney, marriage inequality, and our Kenyan-born, American-citizen killing, war-loving, extrajudicial president (who we love dearly and are praying, to all our gods and Richard Dawkins, gets re-elected).
Well deserved!
He sounds exactly like I was at his age…and still am. A canadian version …a freelancer who never made much at his craft for 15 years but never recanted or changed his views to be more acceptable to Corporate media. And I still don`t own a suit and never wore a tie in my life. Good for you…Matt.
By the way I still managed to be in the National Archives here, And as a Buddhist, that cartoon of Jobs is hilarious.