Clay Bennett, US editorial cartoonist
Clay Bennett does not have the name recognition of fellow artists like
Tom Toles or
Pat Oliphant, but he’s as good as any of them, maybe better.
Bennett was an
army brat who was bounced around the nation growing up before finally ending up at the
University of North Alabama, graduating in
1980. After working briefly for a couple of papers, he joined the
St. Petersburg Times in
1981, spending 13 years there and winning a number of awards before he was unceremoniously fired in
1994.
This was a stunning event for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that Bennett is good, really
good. His clean-lined craftsmanship is evident at a glance, and his skill is all the more apparent when compared to his local competition, the
Tampa Tribune’s right-wing lifer
Wayne Stayskal, who draws like he has
Tourette’s of the hand. The Times admitted the problem wasn’t cost cutting either. Instead, Bennett was canned because he was too liberal for the new editor, and this from the more “liberal” paper of this area’s two major newspapers.
Bennett did some internet work and syndicated with
King Features for a while, until he was picked up by
The Christian Science Monitor in
1998, where he now does 5 full color cartoons a week. In
2002, he won the
Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, so now one of the nation’s most respected papers adds another Pulitzer to its 15 or so, and our local “liberal” paper rests secure in its provinciality and philistinism.
http://www.claybennett.com