Bill Baron, who has contributed editorial cartoons and comic strips to The Taos News
for more than 20 years, has decided to retire from being a regular part of the newspaper.
Bill Baron drew his first cartoons for the Taos News more than 20 years ago, and this week we publish his last (regularly scheduled) drawing.
After a long and distinguished run as our local newspaper cartoonist, Bill, 85, says it’s time to retire and spend more time with his family. We want to thank him, with deep gratitude, for his many years of uniquely drawn, incisive and sometimes controversial cartoons.
Bidding farewell to Bill The Taos News continues:
Since the 1990s, he’s covered just about every issue you could think of in Taos and just about everyone who’s ever entered the Taos limelight in his editorial cartoons.
About the Umberto comic strip from The Taos News of 2018:
The first “Umberto” strip was published on March 18, 1998, but the character has gone through several “incarnations,” before and afterwards. Baron explains how the strip evolved since its conception in 1983 when he was living and working in New York City.
“The initial sketch was of a winged late-middle-aged woman, a fairy godmother who would unintentionally screw up everyone’s life,” he said. “She would salt her dialogue with Yiddish. I thought that would be too much of a cliché, so I changed her to a rotund old man with wings, a fairy godfather. I later developed him into a medieval-looking character who existed in ‘never time,’ walked with a stick and had a pig for a companion. This then developed into a southwestern character, probably because a move to Taos was on the horizon.”
We hope that Bill will continue with his fine arts accomplishments.
