Interview: Jeff Danziger, cartoonist

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The effect of a good political cartoon is a little like that feeling of shuffling along a rug in your socks and then touching a metal doorknob – a short, sharp shock that jolts the system.

Jeff Danziger’s cartoons send quick sparks of shock and laughter to thousands of newspaper readers around the world and right here in Vermont where his work still appears in the Rutland Herald, the paper where he got his start.

Danziger is the winner of this year’s annual Herblock Award for Political Cartooning so named for the late Washington Post cartoonist for “distinguished examples of original editorial cartooning”.

Distinguished is a term Danziger himself takes with a grain of salt. One of his recent cartoons features North Korean leader Kim Jong Il passing nuclear-tainted gas in a crowded elevator with a Cheshire-cat grin on his face.

Danziger’s new collection of cartoons is called “Blood, Debt, and Fears: Cartoons of the First Half of the Last Half of the Bush
Administration”.

He spoke with Mitch Wertlieb about what’s changed for him since covering the Bush White House during its first six years.

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