Good Bye, Political Cartoons

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

I just saw an ugly public official with big lips, protruding upper teeth, flat nose, big eye glasses, fat belly, and crumpled dress. Those downsides could be exaggerated on a cartoon to attract readers and amused them. But, hikbi, er, sigh, beginning last week I no longer drew an illustration for our weekly newspaper's Northern Watch .

The editor-in-chief asked me and writers to add another news article to spike the number of our news for our weekly publication. Since I drew the political caricature for our editorial because the real cartoonist left, I told her I’ll no longer make illustration since it would add more man hours for my work as columnist and  a daily radio commentator.

My 26 cartoons in a row.

For a stint of six months and two weeks, I had passionately drawn cartoons. Drawing, son of a gun, was my childhood past time!

I got the ire of my elementary and high school teachers then because when they became a bore with their teaching, I sketched at my notebooks and my parents reprimanded me when most of these teachers reported my actuation to them.

Ranan Lurie's cartoon. Lurie was the illustrator of U.S magazine's Newsweek.
He influenced' my zeal to draw since my elementary grades

"Beside, notebooks are expensive you just don't draw on them," my mother angrily told me and that was in the late 1970s and early 1980s where cheap notebooks from China ay hinde pa ata uso.

Since elementary grades the illustrations of Ranan Lurie of Newsweek’s and Norman Rockwell of the Saturday Evening Post influenced my hunger to draw. Thanks to the stacks of those magazines preserved until now by my father in our house when he was in the military service.

But making caricature was not a breeze, even one is adroit  in sketching a human being or a thing on a piece of white paper, illustration making entails in-depth understanding of the political situation through elaborate everyday reading of newspaper and news magazine.

Norman Rockwell's painting for the Saturday Evening Post. I had a painting

Bye-bye cartooning works, I’ll be missing you!

(You can read my selected columns at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You can send comments too at totomortz@yahoo.com)