Steve Benson, R.I.P....

The Pulitzer winner was a great talent...and complicated, too.

I heard Steve Benson died yesterday, in the late afternoon, as I was about to go into the grocery store—the banal things we all do. The news stopped me in my tracks.

Steve was my friend, my peer, and, for awhile, my blood rival in the early 1980s. I mean bitter enemy, to be clear.

Back then, you see, Steve and I were “MacNelly Clones,” a group of young cartoonists who were influenced by the late Jeff MacNelly

This is a good illustration of Steve’s MacNelly influence.

We all wanted to be MacNelly.

He was on the cover of Newsweek in 1980, appeared in 440 newspapers (I’ll tell you how I know this in a bit), made millions drawing editorial cartoons and the comic strip, “Shoe,” and, along with Pat Oliphant, one of the best known editorial cartoonists in the world.

After an unpleasant personal situation he had at the Richmond News Leader, he wisely decided to leave town for awhile, so he decided to quit editorial cartooning “to spend more time on his comic strip.”

Um, not really. But he did leave editorial cartooning, which left a big hole for our mutual syndicate, the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, to fill financially.

The Tribune leadership decided to plug me into Jeff’s client list, which wasn’t exactly rote. They had to go to each individual newspaper editorial page editor, and say, hey, we got this guy…and that guy was me.

In three days, they had signed me to 392 new newspaper clients.

At 20, I became the second-most widely read editorial cartoonist in the United States.

If major cartoonists didn’t hate me, they were piteous.

“They never should have done this to you,” a Pulitzer winner told me a few weeks after it happened, like I had been assaulted. Mostly, they just saw me as in over my head, unprepared, and that I had gotten it because my work was reminiscent of Jeff’s, which it undeniably was. They also tried to position me as a conservative, which I wasn’t. That’s the thing I most regret about the entire episode.

I, um, did something for a lot of money I didn’t agree with, and it was obvious I wasn't conservative very quickly. There are not nice words for what I did.

Not a lot of 20 year olds have a fixed style, unless you were Aubrey Beardsley. And then all the money?

My first monthly syndicate check was for $13,000 in 1981 dollars. That’s about $46,000 today, for those keeping score. After a few months, I bought a TR-7—cash. That was a mistake, and if I had put the money in Cisco stock instead of TR-7s, I wouldn’t be inquiring about your ability to maybe kick in on my Substack. But time marches on.

Oh, then there was the national media attention.

I was on Good Morning America, had articles about me in Newsweek, the National Inquirer, and People. My first wife saw that article in People as an Ohio State senior, and decided she was going to meet me, whether I wanted to be met, or not. I declined to meet her the first time. I said, “Listen, someone from your photography class has already come in here, I’m pretty busy.”

She called again the next day, and I agreed to meet her.

We got married 13 months later, and had three great children together.

As I basked in my fifteen minutes of 1981 fame, there was another guy.

Steve Benson of the Arizona Republic, a comically conservative Pulliam newspaper (Dan Quayle was from the Pulliam family).

The Washington Post Writers Group rolled out Steve as an actual conservative, and wow, was he an actual conservative.

He was the grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, the President of the Mormon Church, drew almost identically to MacNelly at the time, had been on his mission to Japan (he liked tako sushi), and was personally in your face, 24/7, about how liberals sucked.

I met him in 1987 or so, and he was friendly, definitely. There was a lot of tension between us, and the world of editorial cartooning was rather cutthroat, the way you’d feel at your high school reunion if you had something to prove.

But Steve and I got along fine, and I got along with the other conservative cartoonists fine as well. I came to really like the very conservative McCoy brothers (still do—they’re great talents), Rick McKee (he is now a sensible Never Trumper and a great pal), and others I’m blanking on.

But Steve was main rival, and we both knew it.

Then Steve won the Pulitzer in 1993. He had also been a finalist 1984, 1989, 1992, and, later, 1994.

But hey. No pressure. I didn’t become a finalist until 2012, and finally won in 2016.

However, Steve and I were cordial, hung around at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention, and got along well.

Although we did have an awkward moment at the 1990 convention in Seattle, where he came up to me with a big smile on his face, and obliquely talked about “two-faced cartoonists who would stab you in the back”.

He had correctly heard I was shitting on him, and wanted to let me know that he knew, without saying it. I kind of admired the play, myself, years later.

Steve got into a horrible tangle with the new governor of Arizona, a loony car dealer (and how) named Evan Mecham. Mecham also happened to be LDS. Steve initially supported him, and then he turned against Mecham, full volume. Mecham didn’t like that, so he called Steve’s grandfather.

This caused a terrible schism in Steve’s family and LDS social circles, and Steve eventually went from being an nice kid in a white short sleeved shirt and a clipboard with a name tag to a proselytizing atheist.

Steve left the church.

As I was in a Jack Mormon family, I knew the drill. My family quit the church early in the century after my formally LDS great grandfather wrote a scathing book about the Mountain Meadow Massacre. so we were silent apostates.

Steve was never silent about anything.

The odd thing about Steve’s work, as artistically talented as he was, was that he moved from extreme liberalism to extreme conservatism from day to day. It was…weird, I guess. He went from being a reliable Reaganite to unreliably anything.

Who am I to judge? I whored out for money in 1981.

What I saw in Steve at that moment was a very courageous and tenacious guy who was trying to find himself on all levels, and who amongst us hasn’t felt that emotion? Steve just had to do it in public.

It was then that I began to feel affection for Steve, a brotherly affiliation, and I admired him and his guts.

He gravitated to me at the convention, and I found Steve by my side at many gatherings, where he would demand that I do my JFK impression under any circumstances. I did, for him.

Steve was incredibly verbally facile. I once watched him do an extemporaneous speech at the Charles Schulz Museum like he was reading it off a teleprompter. One time I saw him doing this same thing in Austin, and you could map out the sentence diagram as he spoke—while he was wearing an absolutely disturbing t-shirt with the Yellow Have Nice Day Smiley Face with an entrance wound in his forehead and an exit wound on the back of his shirt.

The thing is, Steve loved shock value. I don’t know why. I don’t. I like Minnesota low-key values.

Steve was capable of stunningly brutal, unusual, shockingly tasteless cartoons. I once said to him, “Steve, you draw what I call “Jesus Christ” cartoons”.

“What are those?”

“You read your cartoons and scream, “JESUS CHRIST!”

This cartoon is amazing.

He loved that. That’s the reaction he wanted.

Steve also had a very difficult personal life. His daughter was tragically killed in a bike accident, his first wife left him in a very ugly manner, and then he was laid off by the Arizona Republic a few years ago, another victim of corporate Gannett journalism thinking.

There was an absolute uproar when he was canned in Arizona.

Steve was very powerful there. He decided to move up to Tacoma in the early 1990s and worked at the News-Tribune (TNT). Before he got there, Sen. John McCain, a guy who liked shock value himself, called Washington Sen. Slade Gorton and said, “watch out for this asshole”. He then left for Phoenix again, after a year. he tried being a reserve police officer. A former LDS teetotaler, he once asked me beer advice ( I’m not a drinker), and I obliged. He was almost childlike in some ways, and I don’t know why.

Artistically, Steve could literally draw anyway he wanted. He was a dead-on state fair caricaturist and did that in college. Dead on. He could draw like MacNelly. He could draw like anyone. Toward the nd of his career, he veered away from the MacNelly style ( it was still in there, but take a number) and drew some really amazing caricatures and cartoons in Photoshop

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To illustrate Steve, a bit, I once asked for his cell number. He said, “I don’t give out my cell number”.

OK.

Later in his career, I would say he was mostly liberal, and, be ecumenical, a sort of libertarianism.

He delighted in drawing caricatures of strangers, anyone, at the AAEC convention. That was when he was in his saddle, and he would draw you whether you wanted to be drawn, or not. He was compulsive. In his compulsivity was greatness.

The last time I saw Steve was with his lovely wife and partner Claire, to whom he was devoted. I know he was in Long Island in 2018, but I can’t remember where we were last. I spent many hours with him, and loved him.

Why? We grew up together.

It happens.

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Hey, YBs…sad today, obviously. I’ll catch up with several cartoons and columns later today.—J.