Jim Morin, whose work is distributed by Morintoons Syndicate, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1996 and shared the Pulitzer with other members of the Miami Herald editorial board in 1983. He was a Pulitzer finalist in 1977 and 1990.
Q:What's the most significant risk you've taken professionally?
Jim: The most significant risk I've taken was dedicating myself to the profession I chose in the first place. Editorial cartooning is a specialized field in many respects. Your drawing involves caricature, usually one that is negative or highly critical of its subject - not the kind of depiction that would make you popular at parties or county fairs. Your drawings ideally communicate strong, often controversial opinions as opposed to the safe illustration desired by newspaper and magazine editors. What other profession requires such skills? Putting "political cartoonist" on a resume hardly seems relevant for any other employable position. Those that do pursue this path walk on a high wire above a very small safety net. With the precarious state of the print journalism business I've worked to make that net a tad bigger by producing animated editorial cartoons for the Herald's online pages as a sort of insurance in the event journalism shifts its platform from paper to computer screen. Regardless, the employment security risks of drawing cartoons for a living are not a laughing matter.
