Dwane Powell’s pen – mightier than the pol

Dwane Powell says a lot without saying a word. He’s an editorial cartoonist, and a prolific one, publishing more than 12,000 cartoons since he started with a small newspaper in his native Arkansas and during 34 years at the drawing board as the editorial cartoonist at The News & Observer.

After retiring in 2009, Powell, 71, returned in 2013 on a freelance basis to draw cartoons for the Sunday editorial page. He says the rare convergence of a Republican-led General Assembly and a Republican governor created a target his liberal instincts couldn’t resist taking shots at. With tax cuts for the wealthy, miserly funding for schools, transparent attempts to suppress minority votes and the disaster of House Bill 2, the GOP leadership often has Powell wondering where to aim first.

Once he decides, Powell makes his point with a smile instead of a slam. Rather than “sledgehammer cartoons,” he tries for images “that make people look ridiculous.”

His art will be featured in Durham this week ahead of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists Political Cartoon and Satire Festival at Duke University Sept. 22-24. Unlike many groups, the cartoonists will not be boycotting the state over HB2. They’ll be here to lampoon it.

Adam Zyglis, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning and current president of the AAEC, said, “Expressing an opinion is precisely what we do, so I say we should go to the heart of the controversy and speak out on this issue.”

Powell will discuss his work at 6:30 p.m. this Friday during a reception at the Power Plant Gallery at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham. The event will include an exhibit: “Dwane Powell: The Art of Politics, 40 years of Editorial Cartoons & Then Some.” The event is free and open to the public.

Over the next two weeks amid his work and his fellow cartoonists, Powell will celebrate an unlikely career. After growing up on a farm in McGehee, Arkansas, he went to the University of Arkansas-Monticello to study agri-business. He had long been a doodler who was drawn to cartoons in Collier’s magazine and The Saturday Evening Post and avidly followed the cartoonists of Mad magazine. He drew images for his high school yearbook and ended up cartooning for his college paper.

It was only dabbling, he thought. As a college student, he says, “I never considered it as a career.” But when the local newspaper, the Advance Monticellonian, offered him $5 a cartoon, he went professional.

“I figured it was enough for a six-pack,” he says.

His first cartoon featuring then-Sen. William Fulbright was picked up by the Arkansas Gazette, which began to regularly republish him. Then he landed a job as a reporter-cartoonist with the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record and from there went to Texas to draw for the San Antonio Light.

The editors pressed Powell to “come around” to their perspective. “I was obliged to change my stripes,” he says, “but I couldn’t do that.”

He was lifted from that impasse by a call from The N&O offering him a job. He arrived in Raleigh in 1975 where he took on Sen. Jesse Helms and poked fun at Gov. Jim Hunt.

Powell says he doesn’t laugh after he finishes a cartoon. He’s too close to it. But when he recently reviewed decades of work, he was taken by surprise by cartoons he had forgotten.

“I found some that just had me in stitches,” he says. “How did I think of that?”

Despite his long run as a full-time cartoonist, Powell says he has done “some of my best work” post-retirement. The once-a-week pace gives him more time to think, and the state’s Republican leadership has given him rich material. He says the political scene in Raleigh has gone from “a few bad apples” to “ideology run amok.”

“A lot of people are just flummoxed by how this happened,” he says.

This week’s reunion with his fellow cartoonists and the celebration of his career will be especially sweet for Powell. Last summer, a doctor told him he was suffering from a rare and usually fatal cancer that strikes the lining of the abdomen. The doctor said he had six months, maybe a year to live.

Powell absorbed the news and responded, “I don’t think that’s acceptable.” He was told there was a form of extensive surgery that could help, but he might be too old to be eligible. He found a surgeon at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center who said he was fit enough to undergo the ordeal. The surgery was performed last November and he is recovering well. “Cartooning has been a blessing. It’s kept my mind off of it,” he says. He has returned to his normal weight and recently took his bike out for a 30-mile ride.

And he’s still riding the politicians. He says he subscribes to the philosophy that, “All politicians are guilty until proven innocent.”

The ranks of editorial cartoonists are thinning as newspapers cut expenses and struggle to adjust to the digital era. But Powell says there are still a lot of good ones, even if some have to freelance or self-publish on the internet. And those with a genius for satire can find work in new forms, such as “The Daily Show”on Comedy Central.

Of cartoonists, he says, “We’re very much alive.” And for once, thank God, he’s not joking.

This story was originally published September 10, 2016 at 5:16 PM with the headline "Dwane Powell’s pen – mightier than the pol."