It’s always great to find talent inside your own doors — or just outside your door in this case.

Above, you’ll notice our third installment of a local editorial cartoon. The cartoons have been a hit. So much so, that I felt I needed to give a little ink to the background of them in this column. The first week’s toon depicted Meridian Mayor John Robert Smith standing in front of the Threefoot building with a hard hat on.

The caption read:

“This building is structurally sound … wait, this building is a danger to pedestrians … wait, this building is our future.”

The next week he had a new target: Lauderdale County Supervisor Ray Boswell. And if the mayor is on one end of the local political spectrum, Boswell would most likely be found on the other end. Last weekend’s editorial Cartoon featured Boswell with two new “supervisor puppets” appropriately named “Wayman” and “Hank” — an obvious reference to supervisors Wayman Newell and Hank Florey.

I’ve had at least 30 people, through e-mails, phone calls and face-to-face meetings, mention the toons. Most say, “Who is drawing those?”

Here’s the background:

The artist, Chris Stewart, is a page designer at The Meridian Star.

Stewart sits right outside my office door. He’s been at the paper about two years. He’s a Clarkdale graduate who earned his associate’s degree in graphic design at Meridian Community College.

Chris is a laid back guy, a hard-worker with a good sense of humor. For the most part, his job is to lay the paper out every day, specifically the Monday-Friday papers. He takes the reporters’ stories and photographs and puts them on the page with a pretty complicated computer program.

His job is to make the paper look good, make the images “pop” off the front page, using a good mix of photos, graphics and text. On most days, it’s a job that could seem pretty mundane. But Chris always seemed to enjoy it. One night at the paper, probably around 9 p.m., Chris had finished the next day’s paper and we started to chat about his days at MCC in the graphics program.

As we talked, he mentioned that he drew the large 8-foot by 8-foot shadow image of Dr. Martin Luther King that the college uses as a backdrop each year for its MLK Day program. I was impressed. Having seen the image, I knew it was pretty good. He went on to tell me he had drawn it using about 11 black sharpies. He basically dotted the entire image.

I was even more impressed.

The more we talked, the more I learned. It was clear drawing was a major hobby of his.

“You should draw some editorial cartoons,” I said, half jokingly. Chris paused, looked at the computer screen and back at me. He wasn’t laughing.

“You know, I think I could do that,” he said.

Before I left, he was on the Web browsing Marshall Ramsey’s cartoons, who I consider one of the best editorial cartoonists in the country. Days later, Chris was hooked on his blog.

Every few days, we’d chat about the cartoons. He’d say he was “working on some stuff” and then we’d go back to talking about the daily paper. Then, one night after he put the paper out (I think it was about 3 a.m.) I got an e-mail from Chris. In it was an image of John Robert Smith and the Threefoot building. I saw the image as I checked my e-mail on my phone early the next morning. I laughed and was amazed as I looked at the image while walking my dog.

I raced inside to pull up the image on my laptop. It was great. I couldn’t wait to see what he would draw next. Later that day, I tried to search through old papers to see when the last time the newspaper had a local editorial cartoon. I couldn’t find one. “People will love these,” I thought.

At work that day, I asked him if he could draw one a week. “Sure,” he said. “Why not.” Later that night, Publisher Crystal Dupré and I drove to Jackson for a Mississippi Press Association roast of Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant. As we drove we talked about the possibility of Chris’s editorial drawings appearing in the paper. We couldn’t wait for our readers to see them. We also talked about how the subjects of his cartoons may respond.

At the roast, I noticed Marshall Ramsey was on the agenda. He was among those roasting Phil and, quite frankly, he delivered the best barbs.

But one thing I noticed was how much the elected officials, even those who were the brunt of Ramsey’s cutting cartoons, seemed to appreciate the guy and his sense of humor. They respected his work. They didn’t take themselves too seriously.

As Chris continues to draw his weekly cartoons, I love to watch our entire newsroom get involved. They help him with captions and different aspects of his drawings. It’s truly a joint effort.

And just like everyone else, I can’t wait to see what he draws next.



Fredie Carmichael is executive editor of The Meridian Star. E-mail him at editor@themeridianstar.com.