Pat Oliphant, 1935-2026

His influence on American editorial cartooning was incalculable...

Pat Oliphant died yesterday at 90, and this was a moment when all of my colleagues were all texting and calling each other about it.

Pat had been in failing health for quite a long time, and had stopped editorial cartooning entirely for the past ten years or so. We weren't friends, but we were cordially acquainted.

Pat was an artistic polymath. He was a very accomplished sculptor, for example, and could draw pretty much anything however he wanted in the manner he desired. He was close friends with the writer Larry L. King (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) in DC, where they spent a lot of time propping up the bar. That generation of men did that. He was also a pilot, and spent his last decades in Santa Fe.

It is not an understatement to say he influenced two generations of American editorial cartoonists, most of whom tried to draw like him for awhile and then gave it up for their own styles.

Jeff MacNelly, for one.

You could spend a lot of time in the bar discussing the relative merits of one versus the other. I loved Jeff personally, for he was a really nice, mostly unassuming man who died too soon at 52, after his talented son died in a climbing accident at 25. It shattered him, as it would anyone. We exchanged a few letters back then (about 30 years ago) as we all did back then before emails and texts. Interestingly, Jeff’s brother Jocko was a long time musician with A Prairie Home Companion.

So the Oliphant-MacNelly debate re-ignited this morning. Again.

I know a lot of Oliphant stories that I experienced firsthand or heard from highly reliable sources. I won’t share many of them, but suffice it to say Pat was down on Jeff.

Jeff, like most young cartoonists, was very influenced by Pat, and his early work looked like Pat’s. He won the Pulitzer at 24, and then twice more. In 1980, Jeff was on the cover of Newsweek, and wow, did Pat throw a rod after that. He banned Newsweek from using his work, for example, and was very angry about it. He also hated Bloom County’s Berke Breathed’s guts because he won the Pulitzer—the strip contained a character that was directly “inspired”, shall we say, by Pat’s signature character, a little wise-cracking penguin named Punk.

Pat came to the United States in 1964; he succeeded Paul Conrad at The Denver Post, another complicated personality who later mellowed in his old age. Pat then went to the Washington Star for a few years in the late 1970s under Jim Bellows.

Pat won his only Pulitzer in 1967, and stopped entering after that because he thought the Pulitzer process was, um, hinky. He picked out a jingoistic cartoon he thought the Pulitzer Board would like, and he was right. Back then you only entered a single cartoon, unlike today’s 15. He then never entered the Pulitzers again after flaming them on the way out the door. Fact is, Pat could have won 20 Pulitzers after that. In a row. No one would have disagreed, either.

The utter brutality of his work, combined with his dead-on illustration ability, made him the pre-eminent editorial cartoonist. Pat was heavily influenced by Scarfe, Searle, Low, and Illingworth. Later in his career he simply just decided to draw mostly like Illingworth, as no one was checking or cared. But hey.

Pat was Australian, which gave him the attendant confrontational worldview. His uncle was a major politician there as well. Frome time to time, when he wasn’t decapitating some poor conservative elected official, Pat would also do some very troubling stuff (in the 1970s) about affirmative action, gay rights (he once drew gay men hitting each other with purses), and, later, a cartoon about Hillary Clinton on a battleship where he clearly was calling her a c*nt. This is terrible, wrong, and way outside any sort of commentary almost any editorial cartoonist would engage in. So pardon me if I take a balanced view here.

Pat was indeed ecumenical. He was unsparing with Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, annihilated Jimmy Carter, drew Ford and Reagan as dunces, Bill Clinton as a creep, and Nixon as, well, you name it. He wasn’t able to really do anything on Trump.

#sad.

The Nixon era was Pat’s high-water mark. His blunt humor, artistic ability, and lack of regard generally for Nixon was devastating, even definitive. Mike Peters once said Watergate was the editorial cartoonist’s Camelot. He was right.

I was more on the MacNelly side of the equation, but I came up under him and not Pat. In fact, I was described as MacNelly Clone, along with Steve Benson, and a number of others. We all broke away, and that’s how it works. You read Tom Wolfe, you write like Tom Wolfe, and the next thing you know, you’re not capitalizing words. You’re just listening to your own voice.

Let me add a word about my dear late friend Rex Babin. Pat was the judge of the Berryman Award, and he gave the award to Rex. I never heard the end of that from Rex, who was truly a gifted artist, and I would have done the same thing.

Pat was a master of illustration. I can still recall a rollercoaster drawing he did. I don’t remember the idea so much as the way he drew the tracks, tilted to suggest better perspective. He did beautiful, ornate interiors. His buildings were unparalleled. Banisters, darkened entryways, staircases—you name it.

In his later years, he definitely mellowed personally, and when I saw him in Salt Lake in 2013, this was not the same Pat I had encountered previously. He spent a lot of time with the cartoonists there, was warm and reflective, and it made me sad—he could have mentored a lot of young people earlier. I guess he was scrambling like everyone else.

I remember going to a gallery in DC in 1980, and flipping through his originals in a box. They were asking $1200 then, and they were truly marvels. Like, how the hell did he do that marvelous.

I used to say Oliphant was Elvis, MacNelly was The Beatles, and the rest of us were The Lovin’ Spoonful. We were perfectly solid, but drawing when these guys walked the earth, I knew, for various reasons, I wasn’t going to get there, per se. Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of my work, but these were generational talents.

I wasn’t close to Pat, and I am friends with those who knew him better.

I will salute him as his little character in the corner penguin Punk did, a knowing nod and appreciation for his talent, while keeping it real.

As Pat did for decades, my other salute to him will be sitting down and cranking out another cartoon, with particular attention to detail.

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Hey, YBs! : Back to the drawing board. Pat would have wanted it that way. Lots of content to come today, including a radio interview I did last week. Have a great day! —J.