Editorial cartooning Obituary

Jack Higgins – RIP

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D. D. Degg February 14, 2024 1 minute 2 comments

Sun-Times editorial cartoonist Jack Higgins has passed away.

The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting the death of Jack Higgins:

Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun-Times cartoonist Jack Higgins knew the power of the pen.

“Political cartoons are meant to take the mighty and the pompous and cut them down to a more manageable size. Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” he once wrote about his job.

He skewered local and national politicians alike, satirized scandals and offered poignant and absurd takes on city life and ills, especially gun violence.

Mr. Higgins was known for his warmth and kindness and being the highlight of any school group that visited the newsroom and stopped by his drafting table.

Mr. Higgins woke early and digested the day’s news to generate ideas.

“I’ll figure out what bothers me most about something, and how I can take the issue, turn it around, stand it on its head and stick my tongue out at it, so to speak.”

Jack Higgins began his career at Northern University’s Daily Northwestern in the late 1970s and hooked up with The Chicago Sun-Times in the early 1980s. From Jack’s own profile:

I started out drawing cartoons professionally on the Daily Northwestern (Northwestern University) in 1978, then I went to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1981, and shortly after that they brought me on board full time (1984).

Before the 1980s were over Jack had won a Pulitzer Prize.

The Chicago Sun-Times archive of Jack’s cartoons runs from 2015 to 2017.

Anthony’s Comic Book Art site has hundred of earlier samples of Jack’s cartoons.

Reliable sources say that decent people everywhere were shocked and appalled by the tasteless cartoon that issued from the pen of Jack Higgins onto last Friday’s Sun-Times editorial page. It was the one that had Bill Clinton shaking hands with the devil and saying, “This is where we part. It’s been good working with you.” And the devil replying, “Right. See you in 20 years.”

True enough. Mediocre cartoonists who can’t think of anything better have long been allowed to pay tribute to good people when they die by drawing them at the pearly gates. But to send somebody to hell, somebody still living, a former president even, goes way over the top. As an ultimate expression of the rabidly right-wing editorial fervor of today’s Sun-Times, and of the rabidly right-wing cartoons Higgins has taken to drawing, the cartoon becomes even more infuriating.

That said, the more I think about Higgins’s cartoon, the more I appreciate it. It was a real kick in the teeth. It took us back to the days of the founding fathers, when genuine venom spewed from the printed page and the First Amendment was written to protect the spewers. And Higgins might even have had a point worth our taking. What he was getting at, with meat-cleaver wit, was the idea of a Faustian bargain. Nothing bad ever seemed to stick to Clinton while he was president.

Instead we end with Jack’s National Cartoonists Society mini-bio card.

Update/Further Reading:

His reputation preceded him. Long before I set eyes on Jack Higgins, the man, I knew of the gifted editorial cartoonist who, for some unfathomable reason, was stuck drawing for the Daily Northwestern.

Neil Steinberg at The Chicago Sun-Times remembers Jack Higgins.

and

Since I’ve brought up the Sun-Times, I have to take note of the passing this week of its editorial cartoonist Jack Higgins at the age of 69. 

Higgins had started drawing for the Sun-Times a few years before Murdoch bought the paper, so you can’t blame the Aussie for his later turn to the right. Drawing about Chicago politicians for two decades is bound to do that to you.

Paul Berge, much more aware of Jack’s history and with access to The Sun-Times archives, recalls.