Back in October, I kicked off these young cartoonist profiles with the Daily Nebraskan’s Bob Al-Greene. Now the series continues with Bill Richards, recently-retired cartoonist from The Red and Black, the student newspaper at The University of Georgia at Athens.

Richards has received plenty of recognition, including receiving the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Mark of Excellence” award in 2006 and 2007 and being named a finalist for the 2007 Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award. Last month, he was awarded first place in editorial cartooning at the Society of Professional Journalists regional awards and was one of two finalists for the Charles M. Schulz award.

Readers of this site may remember him as one of the collected Virginia Tech cartoonists; I first heard of Richards when someone told me Michael Ramirez had ripped off a college cartoonist from Georgia. Ramirez just won the Pulitzer, so it’s good company.

Since drawing his last cartoon for the Red and Black in January, Richards has been keeping billrichards.wordpress.com updated with more cartoons, commentary and some animations. His absence has been felt on campus, as a Facebook group called “We Miss Bill Richards” has gone up in his honor.

click to view the full-size image and Bill’s thoughts on the cartoon

NEAL OBERMEYER: When did you get your start in editorial cartooning, and what made you decide to start?

BILL RICHARDS: The first editorial cartoon I ever drew was in sixth grade. I think I just drew the school principal making fun of a student who was being crushed by his heavy bookbag. I mostly drew comic strips until college, but I slowly started incorporating more and more overt commentary as I got older. And once I got to college they wouldn’t let me draw comic strips for the paper, so I started “seriously” doing editorial cartoons. At least, I think that’s how it went.

But it was always mainly about the groupies.
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From today’s Daily Nebraskan:

Timothy Haverkamp points to an unfinished pineapple in a design that’s carved in the grand staircase at the governor’s mansion, and explains the artist left it incomplete out of superstition.

Lines on the rug below his feet represent the state rock, he says, and the abstract painting in the sitting room off the foyer depicts Lincoln’s landmark buildings.

Haverkamp rattles off details about each room without notes. The stories and facts are rooted in his mind after leading hundreds of tours through the governor’s residence.

He has worked at the mansion for years. He is also a murderer…

Haverkamp was one of five people who, along with cult leader Michael Ryan, shot off the fingers of Richardson County farmer James Thimm, sodomized him with a shovel and then shot him in the head after throwing him in an open grave.

He now takes your children on tours through the governor’s mansion, essentially unsupervised.

Interestingly enough, as reporter Rachel Albin points out, the governor’s office not only doesn’t want this information publicized, but they wish to respect the rights and privacy of this convicted killer.

Can you believe this is the same governor’s office issuing blistering statements against the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision to rule the electric chair unconstitutional? The governor who demands a vehicle for the most permanent and irreversible form of punishment is concerned about a convicted murderer’s privacy to protect that murderer’s ability to live some kind of a normal life.

That Dave Heineman is one mercurial fellow. Great work, Daily Nebraskan.

UPDATE!! As reported by UWIRE, Heineman’s office has cut off Daily Nebraskan access to the governor!

Press contacts told newspaper staff members that no one would comment to the newspaper in the future, it would be taken off an e-mail list and its staff members would not be allowed to attend press conferences in the Capitol — especially the Governor’s office, said Josh Swartzlander, editor of the Daily Nebraskan.

When contacted by UWIRE, Jen Rae Hein, spokeswoman at the Nebraska Governor’s office, would not respond to questions regarding severing ties with the student journalists and the publication. She did not offer any additional comment and said she would contact UWIRE if she had a comment.

The situation is reminiscent of when Tom Osborne banned the DN from covering NU football practice back in 1995.

as reported in Editor & Publisher:

Osborne met with the team and soon afterwards, Daily Nebraskan students were banned from covering the team’s practice sessions, creating a national media uproar. The Chicago Tribune, for example, warned Osborne not to bite the journalistic hands that fed him.

“Coaches like Osborne, whose sports depend . . . on free publicity are happy to be open when the news is favorable but . . . clam up defensively when criticism comes,” the Tribune said.

The furor convinced Osborne to slightly reverse his field. He rescinded the no practice ban against the student journalists, but refused to allow Daily Nebraskan reporters to interview him or his coaches.

UPDATE!! Now according to today’s Daily Nebraskan, Heineman’s office has backed down.

[Heineman’s Deputy Communications Director Ashley Cradduck] then said the Daily Nebraskan would no longer receive press releases from the governor’s office and the newspaper’s reporters would be banned from covering the governor’s press conferences at the State Capitol.

If Daily Nebraskan reporters were at one of the governor’s press conferences at the Capitol “I would ask the security to see if they could remove (the reporters),” Cradduck said.

When the Daily Nebraskan tried to get a written copy of the new policy, Heineman’s Communications Director Jen Rae Hein refused to go on record with a comment.

She then hung up the phone.

Later in the afternoon, the governor’s office clarified its position by saying Daily Nebraskan reporters would be allowed to cover any kind of press conference at the Capitol, but they would still not receive e-mailed press releases.

I’m sitting at McDonald’s, working on cartoon ideas. The normal mixture of light pop and adult contemporary music was just interrupted by “One Love” by the Stone Roses.

As I am both a McDonald’s fan and a Stone Roses fan, that would’ve been exciting enough for me, but the best part was that “One Love” came on as I started reading columns on the aftermath of the Obama / Wright / speech on race discussion.

Superfreaky. I was just about to hypothesize about the powers of the McDonald’s in-house music, but in the time it took me to peck this blog out on my phone, “Wannabe” by The Spice Girls came on. Maybe that’s about James Carville and Bill Richardson.

Voice of San Diego now has an editorial cartoonist — Ashley Pingree Lewis — contributing cartoons to their Election Central and This Just In sections. You can view all of her Voice cartoons here.

UPDATE 3/18 It has now been revealed that she is Voice editor Scott Lewis’ wife.

I’ve said before that editorial cartoons were never an influence on me growing up, as I never paid attention to them, and for the most part that’s true. But there was one huge exception, and that was a cartoon drawn by Paul Fell in 1990 for what was then known as the Lincoln Journal.

Peru State College had won the NAIA Division II national championship, beating Westminster (PA) College at UNO’s Al Caniglia Field. This was 20 years after Nebraska had won a national championship and still several years before their winning ways would resume.

For the people in and around Peru, this cartoon could not have been more perfect. I remember having it hanging in my locker at school. You’d see it hanging in store windows and on the library bulletin board. This particular photo is of a copy I had, which I colored with Crayola markers and hung up in my bedroom (I was 12). It’s still hanging there in my parents’ house, stained by almost 20 years of sticky tack.

It was most definitely the first editorial cartoon that captured my attention. If anyone reading this blog — cartoonist or reader — remembers the first cartoon that really grabbed you, I’d love to hear about it.

I realized yesterday that the rights to Night Knight — the serialized comic book that ran in the Journal Star back in the spring of 2005 — have reverted back to me.

The Journal Star never did choose to run a sequel or compile the series into book format (a few options that were being thrown around at one point), and the series never ran online, so I guess I’m just wondering if now, almost exactly three years later, there’s any interest in reading it.

If there is enough interest, I figure what I’d do is set up a separate comic strip page, sort of like what I’ve got set up at PlanarianMan.com, and run a page a day like it originally ran.

So I guess let me know in the comments here if you’d like to see the original series online. It started in April 2005, so maybe I could have it ready to go for the 3 year anniversary.