CR: Honestly, when I’m doing this, I have restrained myself to such a great degree. Because there is sort of a freedom that comes with print that people don’t really think about. I approach this very conservatively. I really try to avoid caricature. You can’t really make jokes. In print you can make funny turns of phrases. But you just don’t have room for that. It’s actually, I think, a very conservative representation, if that makes any sense, even though it is a cartoon.

CH: How did this particular series come about? Did you pitch this, or were you asked to do it?

CR: Four, five years ago, I had mentioned to our internal magazine, Times Talk that I was an illustrator and I did a comic for some internal story, for Times Talk. The Metro display editor at the time, Anne Cronin, saw that and said, “Why don’t you do something for Metro?” So I did a display piece for Metro, as a comic, about a papparazo trailing Madonna. Poynter did something about it at the time. But I then I didn’t really do anything else, because this wasn’t going to be a regular thing.

There’s this editor on the national desk, David Firestone, and we ran into each other one night in the city, like two months ago, and he said, “You should do another one.” And we started talking about the campaign.

You hear a lot of the same things everywhere, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, North Carolina. “It’s the economy, it’s gas prices.” And even though those are real problems, and people are really hurting, it’s hard to keep that fresh. So I think that was one of the ideas: “Why don’t we try this and come at it from a different angle.” So they sent me down there.

CH: So how long were you on the ground reporting these pieces?

CR: Just shy of two weeks. Basically I’d go and report for two to three days. I’d love to say, “and then I’d draw for three or four hours and I’d be done,” but frankly they take a really long time—fourteen, fifteen hours for a twelve panel strip. So I’d just sort of lock myself in a hotel room, draw it, scan it, put it in Photoshop, send it to the Times and then move on to the next place.

CH: Was there anything that surprised you about the process? What did you learn doing this?

CR: I learned so much. It was always sort of new, because it is so focused on the here-and-now. The rhythms are so different from regular journalism, because you have to be there in the picture, and you have to get as much information into every panel, without overwhelming it with words. So there are a lot of formal challenges, because you want to tell a narrative with an arc, made purely of factual quotes. But at the same time, you just don’t have nearly as much freedom, in a sense, as you do with print, because you can’t just erase and work things differently. You have to think of twelve distinct little stories that come one after the other. So there was a lot of sitting down and thinking about what the whole thing would look like before you could start. Whereas with print, you can just sit down and start writing. There was a lot more pre-thinking, where you sit down and think, “How is this gonna work?” You have to know what every panel will look like before you start the first one.

CH: What’s your cartooning experience?

CR: I did some cartooning in college. I did some stuff for the college paper, the Georgetown Hoya, but very little. I was an English major, and my thesis—and maybe this reflects badly on Georgetown—was a fiction comic book. But I hear they’re still accredited. I did some freelance work, like I illustrated safety manuals for paper plants. I drew this little cat, and he would get his hand caught in the thresher, or whatever, which was great! Just little things here and there.

CH: Do you cartoon anywhere else?

CR: No. No, no. I mean, it’s definitely safe to say I’m a reporter who does some cartooning, rather that a cartoonist who does reporting.

CH: When I saw the first panel, I thought, “You know what? I’m a little worried about this. I think this could maybe come off a little condescending.” And they don’t at all. I feel like I got a chance to look at a lot of these conversations, and to be in a lot of these places. But it just seems like the form would be a bigger pitfall.

CR: You’re exactly right. That was an anxiety of mine, that the form would imply some level of condescension. I’m from a tiny town in the South, in Alabama. So I’m pretty passionate about not being condescending. So that was doubly on my mind. You need to be very, very, very respectful when you report on people who aren’t used to dealing with the media. That’s a pet obsession of mine anyways.

CH: So what do your subjects think about it?

CR: From the four or five people whom I’ve heard from, they got a kick out of it. But I guess the people who didn’t get a kick out of it, they don’t get back to you.

• 1
• 2