The Texas Observer is celebrating it 70th year and the most recent issue
covers its skewering of Texas politicos by way of editorial cartooning.
In its first issue, on December 13, 1954, the Texas Observer ran a political cartoon by Don Bartlett taking a swipe at the Republican-leaning tendencies of Democratic Governor Allan Shivers. Beside it ran Observer founding editor Ronnie Dugger’s ambitious, if eccentric, manifesto. “We will twit the self-important and honor the truly important,” he wrote. “We will lay the bark to the dignity of any public man any time we see fit.”
It was the beginning of a long Observer tradition—skewering those who needed it, using both printed words and the sharp sword of cartooning.
At the Observer, another Pulitzer Prize winner, Ben Sargent, has been drawing the “Loon Star State” cartoons for 15 years. Before that, he worked as staff cartoonist for the Austin American-Statesman. And before that, as a college student in Amarillo, he was already reading the Observer—and carrying the magazine around “to show what a radical I was.”
In between those two are (in no particular order) cartoonists Mark Stinson, Gerry Doyle, Kevin Kreneck, Jim Franklin, Michael Priest, Danny Garrett, Neil Caldwell, Bob Eckhardt, Berke Breathed, and Jeff Danziger (feature image). Gayle contacts a fair share of those still around.
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