'Leftersons' creator is 'right' on

In the cartoon strip, which pokes fun at an ultraliberal family, the corporate sensitivity trainer suggests baseball enact a "run sharing" program to even out the odds.

Then he gets ejected for yelling about how many trees had to die to make the bats.


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Everett cartoonist Colin Hayes draws the "Leftersons" strip, making fun of vegetarianism, gun-control advocates and ridiculous questions asked by the White House press corps.

The unapologetically conservative comic strip drawn by Everett artist Colin Hayes makes fun of vegetarianism, gun-control advocates and ridiculous questions asked by the White House press corps (Does President Bush watch war developments on television and, if so, does he eat pretzels while watching?), among other things.

Hayes started the cartoon a year ago, trying to blend the humor of a comic strip with the political slant of an editorial cartoon. It's been picked up by nearly a dozen largely right-leaning Web sites, the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper and a small weekly newspaper in Manhattan, Kan.

The central characters are The Leftersons," a family in which dad Upton and mom Imelda met at a voting booth while basking in the glow of having voted for higher taxes.

Their two children collect social causes like trinkets on a charm bracelet. Their goldfish, Gorby, a tortured conservative swimming in a sea of liberalism, tries to sneak American flags into his bowl on the Fourth of July.

In the strip's early days, the characters were largely two-dimensional mouthpieces for stereotypical liberal philosophies, Hayes admits. But now he's trying to deepen the characters' personalities and explore relationships between them.

"I like to express my views, hopefully without being heavy handed," said the 35-year-old freelance technical illustrator. "People get so worked up over politics, on either side, and I try a lot of times to have more of a humorous look at things."

The events of the last week have been testing that fine line, he said. He's drawn strips making fun of protesters and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. But so far his strips have just danced around the margins of the war in Iraq.

Hayes created a blatantly slanted news anchor character early on as a way to comment on current events.

"Now it's almost impossible not to," he said of the war in Iraq. "In a way, it makes things more difficult . . . I have to be sensitive that a war isn't very funny."

Hayes, whose political views range from Republican to Libertarian, has also banded together with two partners to launch www.rightoons.com, a syndication service for conservative-leaning cartoonists that was recently profiled in Editor & Publisher magazine.

They say they're trying to make it easier for newspapers and other media outlets to find balance in their editorial cartoons. Hayes said that field is changing but that artistic careers still tend to attract more people with liberal political leanings.

Hayes, who just started releasing installments of "The Leftersons" three times a week, isn't yet sure how far his own comic strip career will go. He'd like to start drawing it daily.

But he's also found it's a tough business to break into, because newspapers usually get a flood of angry mail from readers any time they drop one comic to make room for another.

In the meantime, Imelda will keep trying to get an NEA grant for her terrible artwork, the goldfish will long for a Republican mate and Upton will continue to rant about traffic jams while refusing to take the bus.

P-I reporter Jennifer Langston can be reached at 425-252-5235 or jenniferlangston@seattlepi.com

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