The first thing to know about Nick Anderson is that he was not born to be an editorial cartoonist. 
The winner of a 2005 Pulitzer Prize was a more likely candidate to slip into a position in the family business - The Andersons Inc. - as a third-generation scion in a Nasdaq-traded company headquartered just outside his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. But early on, at age 15, Anderson set his sights on political cartooning. His father, who holds a doctorate in biochemistry and made a career at the business started by his grandfather (it racked up revenues of $1.3 billion in 2004), questioned young Nick's choice. And for good reason: There are only 90 editorial cartoonists currently at work in the U.S. "He thought I was a lunatic, trying to get a job as a cartoonist," says The Courier-Journal's award-winning staff member. "As a scientist, he didn't like the odds."
Anderson heard frequently that his is a family of businesspeople. But he wanted to bust out of the mold.
"I didn't think I was going to be an editorial cartoonist either," he says, recalling his school days. "I figured the chances were pretty slim, but I didn't want to go to my deathbed without trying."
The second thing to know about Anderson is that he is not uncomfortable with "the system." He may have turned his back on the family business, but he's no black sheep. And he's not someone who automatically hates power and those who wield it.
"I'm not as far to the left as people generally conclude from my work," he says. "My family tends to be moderate Republican. I would consider myself a raging moderate liberal.
"I'm a liberal because I believe there's a role for government. I don't buy the argument that government is the enemy, the devil. Yet I am a hawk, and the reason I point that out is because the people who have tried to discredit those who are anti-Iraq War say, 'They're always against national security.' And I have historically been pretty aggressive on foreign policy."
Let's back up for a moment before we get mired in the Iraq conflict. Nick Anderson is 38 and has been a Courier-Journal staffer since 1991. He interned at the Louisville newspaper before that while working on a political science degree at Ohio State University and started his job here immediately after graduation.
"We didn't want Nick to get away and get ensconced someplace else because he just seemed to fit us," says David Hawpe, the editorial director at the C-J. "He fit us in terms of his collegiality, his ideological viewpoint, his style. I think he has the kind of tone we want for our page - it's a tone that's not disrespectful, but it is provocative."
This put the C-J in the nearly unheard-of position of having two editorial cartoonists on staff for a five-year stretch - popular veteran Hugh Haynie was still drawing panels until his retirement in 1995. Haynie is regarded by many fellow cartoonists as the most talented in the field to never win a Pulitzer.
Anderson borrowed one trick from his elder: Haynie, who died in 1999, was famous for "hiding" the name of his wife - Lois - in the cross-hatchings of each of his artfully drawn cartoons, and Anderson now does the same with the names of his two sons, Colton and Travis. The senior cartoonist did not actively mentor his successor, however. Something of a shadow in the third-floor editorial page offices at the Courier, Haynie kept his own small quarters so cluttered with yellowing old newspapers that he was forced to squeeze his way through a small aisle to his desk. One day a skyscraping pile of papers collapsed into that narrow passageway and Haynie required the assistance of a few colleagues to dig his way out.
"He was very much to himself," Anderson says. "It was difficult to get to know him."
Anderson's office is relatively uncluttered and his personality approachable. He sports a neatly trimmed goatee and his silvering hair is closely cropped on the sides, with a moussed look on top that sends certain strands in slightly-out-of-control directions, making them stand out like highlight strokes on a painting. The beard covers a scar on his chin that Anderson sustained playing roller hockey, a former passion of his. (He met his wife Cecilia in 1992 on a roller hockey court, where she was the only woman skating with a bunch of guys. "She claims I knocked her over in front of the goal," he says.)
For someone who arouses passions - often in the negative, as readers of the letters to the editor in the C-J will notice - Anderson is surprisingly soft-spoken. In conversation, his convictions appear to be deeply held, and he doesn't feel compelled to raise the decibel level to def/files/storyimages/them.
"I would describe Nick as a mild-mannered individual, very thoughtful and well-read," says Courier publisher Ed Manassah. "He thinks through what he does rather than (acting out of) the impulse of doing. And he knows when he's getting to the edge - that's his own feeling of what his personal boundaries are."
Anderson begins his workday when most of us are shutting down. He helps put Colton, 7, and Travis, 3, to bed at night, then probes news-media Web sites for material he can use in his editorial cartoons. "I'm looking for raw materials to build ideas, so I go to news sources that I basically trust - The New York Times and The Washington Post," he says. He generally begins his digging in the Post's online edition, where he can get the next day's stories the night before, and looks over the Times online (he also has the New York paper delivered daily to his home).
"Usually between 10 and 12 at night I've got a topic selected and I'm working on an idea - either I have a couple of ideas or I'm working on one by the time I go to bed, brainstorming until I fall asleep," he says.
"It's not great for my sleeping schedule. My wife's not crazy about my hours, but it works out well for me because I have trouble getting to sleep at night anyway. Rather than staring at the ceiling, I'm actually doing something. And it's kind of nice because once I get an idea I can relax and I'm more apt to fall asleep."
Anderson looks over The Courier-Journal each day and tries to keep up with journals of opinion, particularly The New Republic. But he's time-stressed, so he spends more minutes with publications that give him data he can distill into the simple, often-goading messages we see in his panels.
"I can't stand CNN for too long," he says. "I mean, I watch CNN and Fox just to expose myself to both of those, but I can't take very much. It's really stupefying after awhile."
His wife tunes him into pop culture, including the entertainment news broadcasts and reality television. "Sometimes, much to my chagrin," he says, "I actually get interested in a reality TV show. I start getting absorbed in the plot." Anderson laughs at the thought.
Top cartoonists must sponge up all that is around them, absorbing dry governmental policy as well as celebrity gossip and cultural icons past and present. Anderson says he developed his analytical side by being a serious college student and lifelong voracious reader. The intersection of this thoughtful, left-brained self with the creative, right-brained artist self is where his true talent lies.
As opposed to Haynie, who remained aloof from the deliberations of the editorial board at the newspaper, Anderson is a member who attends meetings to discuss issues and the positions the C-J will take on them. The board is composed of those who write the editorials and plan the opinion pages, with Manassah attending the morning meetings when he can. Hawpe, who leads the sessions, describes Anderson as an articulate contributor.
The cartoonist typically arrives at the meeting with a couple of ideas, which he expresses to the group. Sometimes there is give-and-take on the subject matter, and Hawpe says this collegiality may impact Anderson's work in a couple of ways, either emboldening him or tempering him, depending on the circumstances.
"I think it probably works both ways," says Hawpe. "I think there's some instances where what we say to each other on the editorial board moderates views that he might otherwise have had. And I think there are other circumstances in which what we say confirms; when we 'amen' what he says, that probably encourages him to be bold."
As he sits for an interview in his office, Hawpe is unable to recall any instances where he, as Anderson's boss, ever stopped a cartoon from being published. He calls Anderson in and puts the question to him. "Yeah, I remember one," Anderson says. "It was during the Clinton Administration." When the Monica Lewinsky scandal first broke, he proposed a drawing of Clinton wearing an "I'm with stupid" T-shirt and an arrow below that phrase pointing down toward his crotch. It was held for taste reasons, but, Anderson is quick to point out, the exact image appeared about a month later in syndication from another cartoonist.
Manassah says he has never nixed an Anderson cartoon, and that he usually sees them for the first time in the early evening when they're reproduced in a page-made copy for proofreading. Occasionally, however, the artist will bring one to the publisher's attention early in the day for a reaction. The cartoon that appeared April 5, for example, pushed the boundaries of taste and Ander-son sensed it. In the aftermath of Congres-sional action to approve drilling for oil in an arctic wilderness area, he drew a bearded, buck-toothed letch with "Big Oil" written on his back leering at a voluptuous young woman in a sash that read "Virgin Alaskan Territory." The published panel featured the woman, slightly altering an old Mae West line, "Is that an oil rig in your pocket, or . . . ."
The original comment from the virgin finished with "or are you just happy to see me." Manassah recommended lowering the sexual heat - and making the reference less obvious to very young readers who wouldn't be likely to fill in the blanks - by editing those last words out. "By eliminating a couple of words and leaving it to the imagination," the publisher says, "it made the cartoon better."
Anderson says he avoids a few topics - celebrity trials because they receive too much attention already and abortion because he's "pretty conflicted" about the issue himself - but adds, "I can't think of anything off the top of my head where I've shied away from something because I thought it was controversial. In fact, I t/files/storyimages/to gravitate to those issues."
The Courier cartoon that brought the most heat on him came after just a few months on the job when news broke that officials were promoting plans to sell U.S.-made cars in Japan. It depicted two Japanese men looking under the hoods of American cars and seeing garbage. One says, "What are we going to do with 20,000 American cars a year?" The other responds, "Fix them and s/files/storyimages/them back." "That's when I learned that they make the Ford Explorer here," Anderson says. He took a damage-control tour of the assembly plant after that one and is amused now, 14 years later, that he drives an American-made vehicle.
The five jurors judging this year's Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning awarded the honor to Anderson "for his unusual graphic style that produced extraordinarily thoughtful and powerful messages." He achieves those graphics with a Macintosh computer. First, he makes a refined pencil sketch on tracing paper from the morning's favored rough draft. The tracing paper is then placed beneath a lightweight poster-grade sheet (Bristol board) and mounted on a light table. Anderson then traces and fills in the image with pen and ink. "I used to do the sketch right on the Bristol board," he says, "and I found that I had to erase the pencil afterwards and made a mess of things."
The pen-and-ink version is then scanned into the computer, where Anderson operates on it with Corel Painter ("the greatest computer program ever made; they should be paying me for how often I talk about it"). He spends two hours colorizing his drawings, which has increased his time on the artwork for each cartoon to five or six hours from the previous three. He began experimenting with computer color in March 2004.
"The learning curve at first was really steep, but I was determined to do a good job with it," he says. "And I really like it - that's the thing. I really have a lot of fun with it."
It's safe to say that few of his peers have embraced color and the computer as fervently as Anderson. In the beginning, he tried to teach himself one new trick with Corel each day. That the enthusiasm remains is obvious to an observer as Anderson sits in front of his screen with a "tablet" in his lap and a "pen" he uses to make brushstrokes that emerge onscreen. He keys in various commands to change colors and techniques, from watercolor washes to a computer-aided pointillism.
He may be his own biggest critic. Shortly before the Pulitzer winners were announced in early April (an honor that also earned him $10,000), Anderson was preparing to make a presentation to a group in Chicago. That task involved selecting five of his favorite cartoons. He considered panels he'd submitted for the Pulitzer judging and, amazingly, rejected them, choosing five others instead. "I didn't think they were good enough, but I guess the Pulitzer committee did," he says.
Hawpe has observed Anderson's development up close during his entire Courier-Journal tenure. The editorial director points out improvements in the cartoonist's draftsmanship and in his ability to penetrate more deeply into the issues of the day. "Nick has a lot more confidence than when he came here," says Hawpe.
All of which brings us back to the war in Iraq. Anderson's opposition to the U.S. invasion solidified prior to our commitment of forces there and has remained constant. And it has tainted his view of the second Bush administration.
"I opposed it for national-security reasons," Anderson says of our action in Iraq. "I did not think it was enhancing our national security to essentially leave what we were doing in Afghanistan as a second priority to the project in Iraq. Containment (in Iraq) was working - not perfectly, but it was working."
His argument remains civil but there is, for him, an eruption of passion on this subject. He mentions his early skepticism at the "fear-mongering" of the war's planners and what he calls the "agenda to invade" Iraq that pre-dated 2001's Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Anderson says he saw stories, most often in The Washington Post, that debunked many of the arguments offered for military intervention - particularly on the issue of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction - but those articles were generally "hidden" deep inside the news sections rather than played up on the front page.
"I was just so frustrated because our media was not really covering the other side of this argument and our country got railroaded into war," he says.
Now Anderson, who was known for being harsh with Bill Clinton, sends sharp criticism in the direction of the current Republican leadership in Washington. He did not vote for Bush in the last election (the only Republican he's ever voted for in a presidential race was Bush's father during the 1988 race against Michael Dukakis). But he has cast his ballot for U.S. Rep. Anne Northup and U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell.
"I feel pretty duped," Anderson says. "I feel I was misled. I voted for these guys because they're supposed to keep control of government. But if they cannot muster the political will to cut government spending, they shouldn't be slashing taxes the way they are. I think they've been grossly irresponsible."
On the issue of budget deficits, he pulls no punches: "We'll have a huge financial problem on our hands and these guys don't care. And I'm furious about it. I think it's a moral issue. I do so many (budget) deficit cartoons and people say, 'The deficit is boring.' I don't find it boring. I think it's evidence of a complete dereliction of duty on the part of our politicians."
His syndication contract with the Washington Post Writers Group calls for him to produce at least three of his five cartoons a week on national or international subjects. (They are reproduced in media other than the Courier via this avenue.) Recently, he says, he's more typically drawn four panels on those issues and one each week on state or local happenings. He admits to giving local news "a bit of a short shrift."
"I've had other things I'm focused on and really angry about," he says. Anderson describes Jerry Abramson as a "pretty good mayor" who "doesn't do things that are brazen and arrogant," especially when compared with the behavior these days in Washington. The best cartoons zero in on outrageous or audacious subjects and, according to Anderson, Abramson "can be a bit of a weenie about something controversial."
While his gaze has been directed outward beyond Kentucky, the C-J's editorial cartoonist does not seem to be seeking a bigger stage for himself. Hawpe isn't worried about losing Anderson to a larger media outlet even though a Pulitzer, the most valued award in journalism, might improve his marketability. "We've endured at least three, maybe four, attempts to steal him away," says Hawpe. "We've endured those and that's over. He's been here long enough now to have put down real roots."
Anderson says he's received no job offers since the announcement of the award in April. "It doesn't necessarily work like that. The market for editorial cartooning is pretty stagnant," he says. And the job can be done anywhere someone with a sharp mind and a sharp pen wants to set up shop. (Mike Peters, the popular syndicated cartoonist with The Dayton Daily News, actually lives in Florida.) Anderson minces no words in describing his attachment to Louisville.
"My wife and I are really happy here," he says. "It's an affordable place to live. We've got a place down at Nolin Lake, a cabin. She grew up here. . . . The paper's really good to me."
As someone who channeled his energies from age 15 on an ambitious career path, Anderson already has faced some of the forks in the road that driven people encounter. He's redefined success to include time with his family. He says that he now feels "pretty well-centered." And though he's struggled in the past with the issue of being so demanding on himself that satisfaction eludes his grasp, he thinks he's reached a different plane, one where he no longer feels the need to be constantly climbing.
"Ironically, I feel like I got over that about a year ago," he says, "and no sooner had I come to that point than this came along."
Anderson is pointing to a small shelf near the doorway of his office. On it is a small pentagonal Tiffany crystal engraved with a bust of Joseph Pulitzer and the words "2005 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning." The name etched into the glass is his.
The winner of a 2005 Pulitzer Prize was a more likely candidate to slip into a position in the family business - The Andersons Inc. - as a third-generation scion in a Nasdaq-traded company headquartered just outside his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. But early on, at age 15, Anderson set his sights on political cartooning. His father, who holds a doctorate in biochemistry and made a career at the business started by his grandfather (it racked up revenues of $1.3 billion in 2004), questioned young Nick's choice. And for good reason: There are only 90 editorial cartoonists currently at work in the U.S. "He thought I was a lunatic, trying to get a job as a cartoonist," says The Courier-Journal's award-winning staff member. "As a scientist, he didn't like the odds." Anderson heard frequently that his is a family of businesspeople. But he wanted to bust out of the mold.
"I didn't think I was going to be an editorial cartoonist either," he says, recalling his school days. "I figured the chances were pretty slim, but I didn't want to go to my deathbed without trying."
The second thing to know about Anderson is that he is not uncomfortable with "the system." He may have turned his back on the family business, but he's no black sheep. And he's not someone who automatically hates power and those who wield it.
"I'm not as far to the left as people generally conclude from my work," he says. "My family tends to be moderate Republican. I would consider myself a raging moderate liberal.
"I'm a liberal because I believe there's a role for government. I don't buy the argument that government is the enemy, the devil. Yet I am a hawk, and the reason I point that out is because the people who have tried to discredit those who are anti-Iraq War say, 'They're always against national security.' And I have historically been pretty aggressive on foreign policy."
Let's back up for a moment before we get mired in the Iraq conflict. Nick Anderson is 38 and has been a Courier-Journal staffer since 1991. He interned at the Louisville newspaper before that while working on a political science degree at Ohio State University and started his job here immediately after graduation.
"We didn't want Nick to get away and get ensconced someplace else because he just seemed to fit us," says David Hawpe, the editorial director at the C-J. "He fit us in terms of his collegiality, his ideological viewpoint, his style. I think he has the kind of tone we want for our page - it's a tone that's not disrespectful, but it is provocative."
This put the C-J in the nearly unheard-of position of having two editorial cartoonists on staff for a five-year stretch - popular veteran Hugh Haynie was still drawing panels until his retirement in 1995. Haynie is regarded by many fellow cartoonists as the most talented in the field to never win a Pulitzer.
Anderson borrowed one trick from his elder: Haynie, who died in 1999, was famous for "hiding" the name of his wife - Lois - in the cross-hatchings of each of his artfully drawn cartoons, and Anderson now does the same with the names of his two sons, Colton and Travis. The senior cartoonist did not actively mentor his successor, however. Something of a shadow in the third-floor editorial page offices at the Courier, Haynie kept his own small quarters so cluttered with yellowing old newspapers that he was forced to squeeze his way through a small aisle to his desk. One day a skyscraping pile of papers collapsed into that narrow passageway and Haynie required the assistance of a few colleagues to dig his way out.
"He was very much to himself," Anderson says. "It was difficult to get to know him."
Anderson's office is relatively uncluttered and his personality approachable. He sports a neatly trimmed goatee and his silvering hair is closely cropped on the sides, with a moussed look on top that sends certain strands in slightly-out-of-control directions, making them stand out like highlight strokes on a painting. The beard covers a scar on his chin that Anderson sustained playing roller hockey, a former passion of his. (He met his wife Cecilia in 1992 on a roller hockey court, where she was the only woman skating with a bunch of guys. "She claims I knocked her over in front of the goal," he says.)
For someone who arouses passions - often in the negative, as readers of the letters to the editor in the C-J will notice - Anderson is surprisingly soft-spoken. In conversation, his convictions appear to be deeply held, and he doesn't feel compelled to raise the decibel level to def/files/storyimages/them."I would describe Nick as a mild-mannered individual, very thoughtful and well-read," says Courier publisher Ed Manassah. "He thinks through what he does rather than (acting out of) the impulse of doing. And he knows when he's getting to the edge - that's his own feeling of what his personal boundaries are."
Anderson begins his workday when most of us are shutting down. He helps put Colton, 7, and Travis, 3, to bed at night, then probes news-media Web sites for material he can use in his editorial cartoons. "I'm looking for raw materials to build ideas, so I go to news sources that I basically trust - The New York Times and The Washington Post," he says. He generally begins his digging in the Post's online edition, where he can get the next day's stories the night before, and looks over the Times online (he also has the New York paper delivered daily to his home).
"Usually between 10 and 12 at night I've got a topic selected and I'm working on an idea - either I have a couple of ideas or I'm working on one by the time I go to bed, brainstorming until I fall asleep," he says.
"It's not great for my sleeping schedule. My wife's not crazy about my hours, but it works out well for me because I have trouble getting to sleep at night anyway. Rather than staring at the ceiling, I'm actually doing something. And it's kind of nice because once I get an idea I can relax and I'm more apt to fall asleep."
Anderson looks over The Courier-Journal each day and tries to keep up with journals of opinion, particularly The New Republic. But he's time-stressed, so he spends more minutes with publications that give him data he can distill into the simple, often-goading messages we see in his panels.
"I can't stand CNN for too long," he says. "I mean, I watch CNN and Fox just to expose myself to both of those, but I can't take very much. It's really stupefying after awhile."
His wife tunes him into pop culture, including the entertainment news broadcasts and reality television. "Sometimes, much to my chagrin," he says, "I actually get interested in a reality TV show. I start getting absorbed in the plot." Anderson laughs at the thought.
Top cartoonists must sponge up all that is around them, absorbing dry governmental policy as well as celebrity gossip and cultural icons past and present. Anderson says he developed his analytical side by being a serious college student and lifelong voracious reader. The intersection of this thoughtful, left-brained self with the creative, right-brained artist self is where his true talent lies.
As opposed to Haynie, who remained aloof from the deliberations of the editorial board at the newspaper, Anderson is a member who attends meetings to discuss issues and the positions the C-J will take on them. The board is composed of those who write the editorials and plan the opinion pages, with Manassah attending the morning meetings when he can. Hawpe, who leads the sessions, describes Anderson as an articulate contributor.
The cartoonist typically arrives at the meeting with a couple of ideas, which he expresses to the group. Sometimes there is give-and-take on the subject matter, and Hawpe says this collegiality may impact Anderson's work in a couple of ways, either emboldening him or tempering him, depending on the circumstances.
"I think it probably works both ways," says Hawpe. "I think there's some instances where what we say to each other on the editorial board moderates views that he might otherwise have had. And I think there are other circumstances in which what we say confirms; when we 'amen' what he says, that probably encourages him to be bold."
As he sits for an interview in his office, Hawpe is unable to recall any instances where he, as Anderson's boss, ever stopped a cartoon from being published. He calls Anderson in and puts the question to him. "Yeah, I remember one," Anderson says. "It was during the Clinton Administration." When the Monica Lewinsky scandal first broke, he proposed a drawing of Clinton wearing an "I'm with stupid" T-shirt and an arrow below that phrase pointing down toward his crotch. It was held for taste reasons, but, Anderson is quick to point out, the exact image appeared about a month later in syndication from another cartoonist.
Manassah says he has never nixed an Anderson cartoon, and that he usually sees them for the first time in the early evening when they're reproduced in a page-made copy for proofreading. Occasionally, however, the artist will bring one to the publisher's attention early in the day for a reaction. The cartoon that appeared April 5, for example, pushed the boundaries of taste and Ander-son sensed it. In the aftermath of Congres-sional action to approve drilling for oil in an arctic wilderness area, he drew a bearded, buck-toothed letch with "Big Oil" written on his back leering at a voluptuous young woman in a sash that read "Virgin Alaskan Territory." The published panel featured the woman, slightly altering an old Mae West line, "Is that an oil rig in your pocket, or . . . ."
The original comment from the virgin finished with "or are you just happy to see me." Manassah recommended lowering the sexual heat - and making the reference less obvious to very young readers who wouldn't be likely to fill in the blanks - by editing those last words out. "By eliminating a couple of words and leaving it to the imagination," the publisher says, "it made the cartoon better."
Anderson says he avoids a few topics - celebrity trials because they receive too much attention already and abortion because he's "pretty conflicted" about the issue himself - but adds, "I can't think of anything off the top of my head where I've shied away from something because I thought it was controversial. In fact, I t/files/storyimages/to gravitate to those issues."
The Courier cartoon that brought the most heat on him came after just a few months on the job when news broke that officials were promoting plans to sell U.S.-made cars in Japan. It depicted two Japanese men looking under the hoods of American cars and seeing garbage. One says, "What are we going to do with 20,000 American cars a year?" The other responds, "Fix them and s/files/storyimages/them back." "That's when I learned that they make the Ford Explorer here," Anderson says. He took a damage-control tour of the assembly plant after that one and is amused now, 14 years later, that he drives an American-made vehicle.
The five jurors judging this year's Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning awarded the honor to Anderson "for his unusual graphic style that produced extraordinarily thoughtful and powerful messages." He achieves those graphics with a Macintosh computer. First, he makes a refined pencil sketch on tracing paper from the morning's favored rough draft. The tracing paper is then placed beneath a lightweight poster-grade sheet (Bristol board) and mounted on a light table. Anderson then traces and fills in the image with pen and ink. "I used to do the sketch right on the Bristol board," he says, "and I found that I had to erase the pencil afterwards and made a mess of things."
The pen-and-ink version is then scanned into the computer, where Anderson operates on it with Corel Painter ("the greatest computer program ever made; they should be paying me for how often I talk about it"). He spends two hours colorizing his drawings, which has increased his time on the artwork for each cartoon to five or six hours from the previous three. He began experimenting with computer color in March 2004.
"The learning curve at first was really steep, but I was determined to do a good job with it," he says. "And I really like it - that's the thing. I really have a lot of fun with it."
It's safe to say that few of his peers have embraced color and the computer as fervently as Anderson. In the beginning, he tried to teach himself one new trick with Corel each day. That the enthusiasm remains is obvious to an observer as Anderson sits in front of his screen with a "tablet" in his lap and a "pen" he uses to make brushstrokes that emerge onscreen. He keys in various commands to change colors and techniques, from watercolor washes to a computer-aided pointillism.
He may be his own biggest critic. Shortly before the Pulitzer winners were announced in early April (an honor that also earned him $10,000), Anderson was preparing to make a presentation to a group in Chicago. That task involved selecting five of his favorite cartoons. He considered panels he'd submitted for the Pulitzer judging and, amazingly, rejected them, choosing five others instead. "I didn't think they were good enough, but I guess the Pulitzer committee did," he says.
Hawpe has observed Anderson's development up close during his entire Courier-Journal tenure. The editorial director points out improvements in the cartoonist's draftsmanship and in his ability to penetrate more deeply into the issues of the day. "Nick has a lot more confidence than when he came here," says Hawpe.
All of which brings us back to the war in Iraq. Anderson's opposition to the U.S. invasion solidified prior to our commitment of forces there and has remained constant. And it has tainted his view of the second Bush administration.
"I opposed it for national-security reasons," Anderson says of our action in Iraq. "I did not think it was enhancing our national security to essentially leave what we were doing in Afghanistan as a second priority to the project in Iraq. Containment (in Iraq) was working - not perfectly, but it was working."
His argument remains civil but there is, for him, an eruption of passion on this subject. He mentions his early skepticism at the "fear-mongering" of the war's planners and what he calls the "agenda to invade" Iraq that pre-dated 2001's Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Anderson says he saw stories, most often in The Washington Post, that debunked many of the arguments offered for military intervention - particularly on the issue of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction - but those articles were generally "hidden" deep inside the news sections rather than played up on the front page.
"I was just so frustrated because our media was not really covering the other side of this argument and our country got railroaded into war," he says.
Now Anderson, who was known for being harsh with Bill Clinton, sends sharp criticism in the direction of the current Republican leadership in Washington. He did not vote for Bush in the last election (the only Republican he's ever voted for in a presidential race was Bush's father during the 1988 race against Michael Dukakis). But he has cast his ballot for U.S. Rep. Anne Northup and U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell.
"I feel pretty duped," Anderson says. "I feel I was misled. I voted for these guys because they're supposed to keep control of government. But if they cannot muster the political will to cut government spending, they shouldn't be slashing taxes the way they are. I think they've been grossly irresponsible."
On the issue of budget deficits, he pulls no punches: "We'll have a huge financial problem on our hands and these guys don't care. And I'm furious about it. I think it's a moral issue. I do so many (budget) deficit cartoons and people say, 'The deficit is boring.' I don't find it boring. I think it's evidence of a complete dereliction of duty on the part of our politicians."
His syndication contract with the Washington Post Writers Group calls for him to produce at least three of his five cartoons a week on national or international subjects. (They are reproduced in media other than the Courier via this avenue.) Recently, he says, he's more typically drawn four panels on those issues and one each week on state or local happenings. He admits to giving local news "a bit of a short shrift."
"I've had other things I'm focused on and really angry about," he says. Anderson describes Jerry Abramson as a "pretty good mayor" who "doesn't do things that are brazen and arrogant," especially when compared with the behavior these days in Washington. The best cartoons zero in on outrageous or audacious subjects and, according to Anderson, Abramson "can be a bit of a weenie about something controversial."
While his gaze has been directed outward beyond Kentucky, the C-J's editorial cartoonist does not seem to be seeking a bigger stage for himself. Hawpe isn't worried about losing Anderson to a larger media outlet even though a Pulitzer, the most valued award in journalism, might improve his marketability. "We've endured at least three, maybe four, attempts to steal him away," says Hawpe. "We've endured those and that's over. He's been here long enough now to have put down real roots."
Anderson says he's received no job offers since the announcement of the award in April. "It doesn't necessarily work like that. The market for editorial cartooning is pretty stagnant," he says. And the job can be done anywhere someone with a sharp mind and a sharp pen wants to set up shop. (Mike Peters, the popular syndicated cartoonist with The Dayton Daily News, actually lives in Florida.) Anderson minces no words in describing his attachment to Louisville.
"My wife and I are really happy here," he says. "It's an affordable place to live. We've got a place down at Nolin Lake, a cabin. She grew up here. . . . The paper's really good to me."
As someone who channeled his energies from age 15 on an ambitious career path, Anderson already has faced some of the forks in the road that driven people encounter. He's redefined success to include time with his family. He says that he now feels "pretty well-centered." And though he's struggled in the past with the issue of being so demanding on himself that satisfaction eludes his grasp, he thinks he's reached a different plane, one where he no longer feels the need to be constantly climbing.
"Ironically, I feel like I got over that about a year ago," he says, "and no sooner had I come to that point than this came along."
Anderson is pointing to a small shelf near the doorway of his office. On it is a small pentagonal Tiffany crystal engraved with a bust of Joseph Pulitzer and the words "2005 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning." The name etched into the glass is his.
