A Moment With ... Cartoonist Ward Sutton

Ward Sutton, a Minnesota native who lived in Seattle for four years, is a guy whose work roars with all the outrage, disgust and frustration you'd never hear in his voice.


	Ward Sutton

His strips have appeared in The Stranger, the Seattle Weekly as well as The New York Times, Mother Jones and more; if you've somehow managed to miss it, a "Sutton Impact" compilation (Seven Stories Press, 128 pages, $18.95) will be out on Thursday. The 38-year-old, New York-based cartoonist, who will be at The Elliott Bay Book Co. Tuesday night at 7:30, took some time to chat with us last week:

Your views on the Bush administration probably speak to some while offending others. Which d

o you get more of, fan mail or hate mail?

I probably get more fan mail. ... It's really more about my work than me personally. I actually get people coming up to me and thanking me for my work. It's somewhere that they're seeing their views reflected.

So you think you get away with more because you're a cartoonist?

It might be. There might be something built into that that people might feel like they don't have a sense of humor if they get too upset about cartoons. Although after the election I got some "Ha, ha, ha, leave my country if you don't like it" stuff.

Some cartoonists use children or animals to communicate their views -- you pretty much go straight for ultra-right-wing America's jugular. Have you thought about taking the safe route and using cows or cuddly kids?

(Laughs) I do different things with my work, but my cartoons that are in my book are really my chance to say exactly what I feel and I made the conscious decision after the 2000 elections that I was no longer going to tone down my work to make it more palatable for media outlets. I don't make hardly any money off of it anyway, it's just a labor of love. I am really thrilled that Seven Stories Press found value in my work and wanted to publish it in the way they did ... I plan to keep pushing the envelope.

Ever consider a career in politics?

I've started to think about that. I come from Minnesota where a pro wrestler became governor. So the prospect of a cartoonist as a governor or senator isn't that crazy but I'm not sure that's where my strengths lie.

What's the future of political dissent in this country?

It feels at present that political dissent has been squelched and demonized. I think that what's happening is that the Sept. 11 attacks have scared some people from being vocal and has scared the media from reporting dissent because they're afraid they'll be accused of being unpatriotic. But things are changing ... there are hopeful signs.

If you were told today that you could only draw one more strip, what would you focus on, what would you say?

What my cartoons are about is that idea that Americans have fallen into a trap of believing a set of preordained rules, like "As long as I wear a flag on/ my shirt and have this sticker on my car, I'm patriotic" or, "Disagreeing with the government means I'm not a patriot." ... So I would make it cover that theme of trying to expose what's going on in this country, that there's a fairy-tale version of what's going on that a lot of people are accepting, and there's a reality out there that's being ignored because ... a lie can only exist if there are willing listeners.

-- D. Parvaz

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