A history of Wildcat political cartoons

A group of angry Middle-Eastern students stood in the doorway to the offices of the Arizona Daily Wildcat, peering around the newsroom.

"Where is the little cartoonman?" they demanded.

The short, pimply faced student they were looking for approached and told them the "cartoonman" was not in but he would let the cartoonist know they dropped by.

"Always be ashamed of your work. That's my motto," says David Fitzsimmons almost 25 years later, not so pimply but just as witty.

"That was one of the most profound lessons I learned from my days at the Wildcat."

The Fitzsimmons' cartoon that angered the students was one that illustrated the gas shortage of the mid-1970s with an Arab in a robe and 5-o'clock shadow withholding oil from a hungry tin man.

The Arizona Daily Wildcat's tradition of political cartooning only goes back about 30 years, but in that time it has entertained and scandalized, enlightened and disgusted.

The steady succession of cartoonists began in 1971 with the arrival of Rand Carlson.

A philosophy transfer student from California, Carlson joined the Wildcat during turbulent times in America with his series called "Only in America."

"I did a lot of cartoons about pot smoking and the draft," Carlson says from his light-filled studio on a busy corner in downtown Tucson, where he produces cartoons for the Tucson Weekly and other publications.

In one Wildcat cartoon the hand of Uncle Sam reaches into a lottery bin filled with balls labeled with birth dates. March and August dates scramble in horror within Uncle Sam's grasp while July 23 stands atop the heap sticking out its tongue.

"It was a philosophical piece responding to the arbitrary nature of the Vietnam draft. My brother got picked while I got to stay home."

Carlson recalls his time at the Wildcat at the beginning and the end of the 1970s with fondness.

"I had tremendous freedom to do what I wanted to do. There was a lot of trust."

While Carlson took a hiatus from school in the mid-1970s, Fitzsimmons inadvertently began his career as the Wildcat cartoonist when his mother put together some of his drawings from the Rincon High School newspaper and submitted them without asking.

"It was the supreme humiliation," he recalls laughingly. "But I was so thrilled when they called up and asked me to draw."

His first cartoon was about President Ford pardoning Richard Nixon.

"That's ancient history. You may as well be talking about cave drawings in France," he says from his cubby-hole office at The Arizona Daily Star where he draws his popular editorial cartoons and is affectionately known as "Fitz."

For three years the graphic design major drew cartoons and illustrations in the windowless Wildcat offices in the basement of the Student Union.

"I hung out there too much, but I felt it was an island of mutants where I could be among my own kind.

"It was a great place to meet women who didn't mind men who were deranged, physically unfit and with bad skin. I was in heaven.

The Wildcat was a wonderful experience," he says. " It made me seriously contemplate being an editorial cartoonist, which was stupid because there are only 120 out there and a job opens only when one dies or retires."

Through an infectious giggle, Fitzsimmons adds, "Unfortunately no one died or retired when I graduated."

After graduating, Fitzsimmons worked as a newsroom artist for an Oklahoma paper.

Before returning to Tucson as the Star's cartoonist, Fitzsimmons worked for the Virginian Pilot-Ledger where he drew upon his confrontational experience from the Wildcat.

A day after drawing a cartoon criticizing a local bank, Fitzsimmons was in his editor's office when the paper's publisher stormed in asking, "Where is that little SOB Fitzsimmons? He just cost us $7,000 in advertising from the bank!"

As Fitzsimmons sat there staring into the fuming face of the publisher, his editor calmly replied, "I don't know where he is but I'll talk to him about it."

For almost a decade, from 1986 to 1994, Joe Forkan illustrated the pages of the Wildcat with his self-admittedly obnoxious cartoons.

"There were a lot of things that needed to be made fun of," says Forkan, standing in his cluttered home studio where he produces the four-panel comic strip "Staggering Heights" for the Tucson Weekly and In Pittsburg.

Forkan began at the Wildcat with the comic strip "Wolfbane" and quickly found himself producing four comic strips, a couple of editorial cartoons and an illustration or two a week.

For five years Forkan drew editorial cartoons for the Wildcat's opinion page.

One of the most memorable cartoons for Forkan depicted the pope standing in a graveyard labeled as "The World's AIDS Dead" with the holy father saying, "I'm glad you all followed the papal order to not use birth control."

"I got hate mail from priests for that one," Forkan recalls.

Sitting in the front room of his historic Tucson home, amid walls that climb to a ceiling of cathedral proportions covered with dark-hued paintings that reveal a personal side to this wry cartoonist, Forkan talks of his approach to cartooning.

"I try to do stuff about what people don't write or talk about," he says.

Throughout most of the 1990s, the editorial pages of the Wildcat featured the illustrations of Tom Wentzel.

Though he could be found hunched over a sheet of paper, scribbling his take on the scandal of the day, Wentzel wasn't what most students would imagine a college paper cartoonist to be.

Wentzel was a doctoral student earning his degree in physics. And married.

"I don't think most people in my classes knew who I was," he says.

Wentzel drew cartoons beginning with a back-page strip called Roy A. Ink, which appeared twice a week and featured a wizard in a pointed hat who was a spoof of one of his undergraduate physics professors.

In 1992 he was asked to draw editorial cartoons, a very good time to have that job at the University of Arizona.

"There was a lot of controversy on campus with Mount Graham and (Provost Paul) Sypherd cutting departments," he recalls.

In a cartoon that summed up the tumultuous 1994-95 school year, Wentzel pictured representatives of the Journalism, Statistics and Athletics departments lined up at a window of the newly created UA Research Park. One representative has a knife in his back, another riddled with bullets and the last with an ax in her head. At the window, under a banner that reads "Now Renting," stands a woman saying, "If your previous landlord can't provide any better references that those, then forget it!"

"I tried to present things in a way to help others see it in a different way," he says from his Tucson home.

"But I'm sure other people would look at it and say, 'He's a raging liberal.'"

While Fitzsimmons was a confessed newsroom junkie, Wentzel admits, "I was a newsroom outsider. I didn't have the luxury of hanging out in the newsroom with all my school and work."

But for eight years, until his work as a data manager forced him to stop drawing, Wentzel illustrated the UA campus' controversies and issues with his uncluttered and straightforward cartoons.

Though at times they have been a thorn in the side of UA administrators, drawn scourge from religious leaders and come close to inciting riots, the editorial cartoonists of the Arizona Daily Wildcat have recorded the controversies of the times with a humorous eye that only some can appreciate.

As Joe Forkan recalls when he began drawing editorials, "I realized some people liked it and some poeple were pissed off by it."

"I thought, 'This is cool!'"